(B) Bright clippings
23 Egyptian Proverb: The worst things:
To be in bed and sleep not,
To want for one who comes not,
To try to please and please not.
(C) Conversation and Things Overheard
39 “You believe in something,” he said, after a long time.
“I don’t know yet what it is. You’re lucky to believe in something.”
“I believe in nothing.”
“Yes, you do. You believe that’s crouching in this room very near you now—something that you tried to do without and couldn’t do without. And now it’s gradually taking form again and you’re afraid.”
59 You hate people, don’t you?
Yes, and you do too.
I hate them like hell.
What are you going to do about it?
I don’t know. But not that anyhow. If I’m cold I’m not going to always use it to learn their secrets by finding them off guard and vulnerable. And I’m not going around saying I’m fond of people when I mean I’m so damned used to their reactions to my personal charm that I can’t do without it. Getting emptier and emptier. Love is shy. I thought from the first that no one who thought about it like you did ever had it.
67 I’m in a hurry
I’m in a hurry. I’m in a hurry
What are you in a hurry about?
I can’t explain I’m in a hurry
74 Feel wide awake—no but at least I feel born, which is more than I did the first time I woke up.
76 In utter weariness he asked her once in different words, “Then where do you go from here—where do you turn?”
“Toward life,” she said “Toward life,” and turned toward him.
(D) Description of Things and Atmosphere
143 Days of this February were white and magical, the nights were starry and crystalline. The town lay under a cold glory.
162 The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.
188 The blurred world seen from a merry-go-round settled into place; the merry-go-round suddenly stopped.
202 Drawing away from the little valley, past pink pines and fresh, diamond-strewn snow.
206 Cannes in the season—he was filling the cafe, the light which blazed against the white poplar bark and green leaves with sprightlier motes of his own creation—he saw it vivid with dresses just down from Paris and giving off a sweet pungent odor of flowers and chartreuse and fresh black coffee and cigarettes, and mingled with these another scent, the mysterious thrilling scent of love. Hands touched jeweled hands over the white tables; the vivid gowns and the shirt fronts swayed together and matches were held, trembling a little, for slow lighting cigarettes.
246 Out the window, the snow on the pine trees had gone lilac in the early dusk.
295 They all went to the porch, where the children silhouetted themselves in silent balance on the railing and unrecognizable people called greeting as they passed along the dark dusty street.
296 The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence
301 Is there anything more soothing than the quiet whir of a lawnmower on a summer afternoon?
303 This restaurant with a haunted corner.
1753 The mechanical sound of pingpong balls on a rainy afternoon.
(E) Epigrams, Wise Cracks and Jokes
326 One of those tragic efforts like repainting your half of a delapidated double house.
404 Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
413 Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
(F) Feelings & Emotions (without girls)
451 “I feel as if I had a cannon ball in my stomach.”
464 She wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe forever.
(G) Descriptions of Girls
472 She was not more than eighteen—a dark little beauty with the fine crystal gloss over her that, in brunettes, takes the place of a blond’s bright glow.
477 An exquisite, romanticized little ballerina.
492 She was the girl from foreign places; she was so asleep that you could see the dream of those places in the faint lift of her forehead. He struck the inevitable creaky strip and promptly the map of wonderland written on the surface of women’s eyebrows creased into invisibility.
513 She was a thin, a thin burning flame, colorless yet fresh. Her smile came first slowly, shy and bold, as if all the life of that little body had gathered for a moment around her mouth and the rest of her was a wisp that the least wind would blow away. She was a changeling whose lips were the only point of contact with reality.
520 A girl who could send tear-stained telegrams.
523 Sat a gold-and-ivory little beauty with dark eyes and a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.
530 Passing within the radius of the girl’s perfume.
537 Emily, who was twenty-five and carried space around with her into which he could step and be alone with their two selves.
542 A woman’s laughter when it’s like a child—just one syllables, eager and approving, a crow and a cry of delight.
546 Always a glisten of cold cream under her eyes, of wet rouge on her lips.
566 Women are fragile that way. You do something to them at certain times and literally nothing can ever change what you’ve done.
592 Bright, unused beauty still plagued her in the mirror.
1740 For she has a good forgetting apparatus. That’s why she’s so popular, why she can have a heart like a hotel. If she couldn’t forget, there wouldn’t be any room.
1744 She’ll never meet a stranger.
(H) Descriptions of Humanity (Physical)
618 Photographed through gauze.
622 His heart made a dizzy tour of his chest.
636 She did not plan; she merely let herself go, and the overwhelming life in her did the rest. It is only when youth is gone and experience has given us a sort of cheap courage that most of us realize how simple such things are.
683 She reminds me of a record with a blank on the other side.
687 Family like the last candies left in dish
688 She was so thin that she was no longer a girl, scarcely a human being—so she had to be treated like a grand dame
(I) Ideas
720 Girl and giraffe
733 The Dancer Who Found She Could Fly
787 Shooting at the Moon (play idea).
839 That September 1924, I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.
843 My idea about depth in three dimension pictures about submarines.
1761 Story—A hole or bag in which someone finds all the things he’s ever lost.
(L) Literary
1024 Resent the attempt of the boys and girls who tried to bury me before I was dead.
1037 There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people if he’s any good.
(O) Observations
1247 Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow.
1261 Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.
1268 Dispairingly and miserably, to what purpose neither knew, as people in fire save things they don’t want and have long disliked.
1285 Francis says he’s tired of a life like a full glass of water, relations with people a series of charades, you never do the whole world.
1295 It seemed to her that the dance was woman’s interpretation of music; instead of strong fingers, one had limbs with which to render Tschaikovsky and Stravinski; and feet could be as eloquent in Chopiniana as voices in The Ring. At the bottom it was something sandwiched in between the acrobats and the trained seals; at the top it was Pavlova and art.
1297 They would like to have been her, but not to have paid the price in self-control.
1325 Zelda’s idea: the bad things are the same in everyone; only the good are different
1355 The luxuriance of your emotions under the strict discipline, which you habitually impose on them, makes that tensity in you that is the secret of all charm—when you let that balance become disturbed, don’t you become just another victim of self-indulgence?—breaking down the solid things around you and, moreover making yourself terribly vulnerable.
1363 There’s quite a case for self-pity—save for that, I’d long ago have died of pitying you.
1757 One man only felt suffering as with his fingers felt its rough shape. Another seemed to hold it against his cheek.
(S) Scenes and Situations
1407 She stood there in the middle of an enormous quiet. The pursuing feet that had thundered in her dream had stopped. There was a steady, singing silence.
1412 The realization came to her that the tracks of life would never lead anywhere and were like tracks of the airplane; that of their plan no one knew it; if they were tracked with no particular Daniel Boone to hack trees; that the world had to go on and that it wasn’t going to be inside her, there still had to be these tracks. It was an awful lonesome journey.
1535 She had never done anything for love before. She didn’t know what it meant. When her hand struck the bulb she still didn’t know it, nor while the shattered glass made a nuisance by the bedside.
1538 NOSTALGIA OR THE FLIGHT OF THE HEART
(U) Unclassified
1599 LIVES OF THE DANCERS (A Ballet Synopsis) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
SUMMARY
I Some Russians and the dance, before the war. Heartburn in a village.
II The dancing characters are moved by fate to post-war Paris.
(Appendix) Loose Notes
1851 A feeling of having had life pass virtually and endlessly before their eyes like a motion picture reel and give it that much attention.
1878 You’re all the songs
