See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure. F.

Tales of the Jazz Age.

That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name.

That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.