The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, befo… - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I like to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

she knew that for her the greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.