📔 Tender Is the Night

Quotes from this book

One of the girls hoisted her skirt suddenly, pulled and ripped at her pink step-ins and tore them to a sizeable flag; then, screaming "Ben! Ben!" she waved it wildly. When the subject of Mr. Denby fell of its own weight, he essayed other equally irrelative themes, but each time the very deference of Dick's attention seemed to paralyze him, and after a moment's stark pause the conversation that he had interrupted would go on without him. But they were frightened at his survivant will, once a will to live, now become a will to die. As Rosemary came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran past her and dashed into the sea with exultant cries. Feeling the impactive scrutiny of strange faces, she took off her bathrobe and followed. … This ship is nice, with our heels hitting the deck together. This is the blowy corner and each time we turn it I slant forward against the wind and pull my coat together without losing step with Dick. Some never-atrophying instinct warned him of danger, of gangings up against him--he was never so dangerous himself as when others considered him surrounded. There were five people in the Quirinal bar after dinner, a high-class Italian frail who sat on a stool making persistent conversation against the bartender's bored: “Si … Si … Si,” a light, snobbish Egyptian who was lonely but chary of the woman, and the two Americans. [A]s she stood by the grilled entrance waiting for an answer to the message on her card, she might have been looking into Hollywood. The bizarre débris of some recent picture, a decayed street scene in India, a great cardboard whale, a monstrous tree bearing cherries large as basketballs, bloomed there by exotic dispensation, autochthonous as the pale amaranth, mimosa, cork oak, or dwarfed pine. "I've done nothing yet," he would say, "I don't think I've got any real genius. But if I keep trying I may write a good book." Fine dives have been made from flimsier spring-boards.