This Side of Paradise quotes

a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken....

“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”

I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.

I think four men have discovered Paris to one that discovered God.

Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.

To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him.

No, I’m romantic—a sentimental person thinks things will last—a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

You’re not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not

None of the Victorian mothers—and most of the mothers were Victorian—had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed.

at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.

You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.

Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it’s rotten now. It’s the ugliest thing in the world. It’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor.

All in all Beatrice O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.

The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a failure.

One thing I know. If living isn’t a seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.

There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend—all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness.

The education of all beautiful women is the knowledge of men.

Don’t worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest pose of all.

He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want—not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while.

No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

I know I’m not a regular fellow, yet I loathe anybody else that isn’t.

Amory found it rather fascinating to feel that any popular girl he met before eight he might quite possibly kiss before twelve.