The Beautiful and Damned

Then these girls had gone east or west or south, married and become "people," prophesying, if they prophesied about Gloria, that she would come to a bad end - not knowing that no endings were bad, and that they, like her, were by no means the mistresses of their destinies.

Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't.

He's the sort whose idea of honoring and respecting a woman would be never to give her any excitement.

The Sunday Times, scattered about his feet, proclaimed by rotogravure and editorial, by social revelation and sporting sheet, that the world had been tremendously engrossed during the past week in the business of moving toward some splendid if somewhat indeterminate goal.

Such a kiss — it was a flower held against the face, never to be described, scarcely to be remembered; as though her beauty were giving off emanations of itself which settled transiently and already dissolving upon his heart.

"Art isn't meaningless."
"It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so."

"You don't want to do anything?"
"I want to sleep."
"Sleep?"
"Sort of. I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe - and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me. But I never want to change people or get excited over them."

It was his pride, this bathroom. He felt that if he had a love he would have hung her picture just facing the tub so that, lost in the soothing steamings of the hot water, he might lie and look up at her and muse warmly and sensuously on her beauty.

And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

- Подожди, Глория, - кричал он, - дай мне объяснить!

• Ничего не надо объяснять. Поцелуй меня.