“It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.”

“I want it to smell of magnolias insteadof peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on the same gravel that Lee'sboots crunched on. There's no beauty without poignancy and there's nopoignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books,houses--bound for dust--mortal--”

“This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding-- it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.”

“You should have risen above it," I said smugly. "It's not a slam at you when people are rude -- it's a slam at the people they've met before.”

“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.”

“Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: “Get some chairs, why don‟t you, so somebody can sit down.”

“there's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--"a small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful of banana peels, flung them valiantly in the direction of the potomac.”