“In fact to write (This Side of Paradise) took three months; to conceive it-- three minutes; to collect the data in it-- all my life.”

“To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life. ”

“You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.”

“Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world--they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.”

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”

“Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”

“We haven’t met for many years, said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be."Five years next November."The automatic quality set us all back at least another minute.”