“From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound - something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness - and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.”

“all the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness, and by that promise giving it”

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

“Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as inevitably his-- the pageantry and carnival of rich dusk and dim streets... it seemed that he had closed the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of life. Everywhere these countless lights, this promise of a night of streets and singing-- he moved in a half-dream through the crowd as if expecting to meet Rosalind hurrying toward him with eager feet from every corner... How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his. Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds upon the summer air.”

“Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

“The grass is full of ghosts tonight.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.' They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees. 'You know,' whispered Tom, 'what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years.' ...And what we leave here is more than class; it's the whole heritage of youth. We're just one generation-- we're breaking all the links that seemed to bind us her to top-booted and high-stocked generations. We've walked arm and arm with Burr and Light-Horse Harry Lee through half these deep-blue nights.' 'That's what they are,' Tom tangented off, 'deep-blue-- a bit of color would spoil them, make them exotic.' Spries, against a sky that's a promise of dawn, and blue light on the slate roofs-- it hurts... rather--' 'Good-by, Aaron Burr,' Amory called toward deserted Nassau Hall, 'you and I knew strange corners of life.”

“She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.”