“Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness.”

“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.”

“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”

“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 cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time-time, that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights.”

“First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and third---before long the best lines cancel out---and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the picture have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true.”

“The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes.”