“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”

“the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”

“I can’t tell you just how wonderful she is. I don’t want you to know. I don’t want any one to know.”

“They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically when they read ... Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream.”

“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”

“There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.”

“There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot;there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth-yet thewaters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and alove of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealizeddreams......And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he haddetermined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from thepersonalities he had passed...He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.”