A Girl I Knew Quotes

“The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight.”

“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”

“I don’t know any more. I used to know, but I lost the knowledge a long time ago.”

“I knew it would take a certain amount of deep, constructive brooding on my father’s part to figure out a way of getting me into the firm in broad daylight - I happened to give both his partners the willies on sight.”

“Her English, like my German, was nearly all holes. Yet invariably I spoke her language and she mine, although any other arrangement at all might have made for a less perforated means of communication.”

“Maybe I just worried too much about things.”

“We just never said anything to each other. Over a period of four months, we must have talked for thirty or thirty-five evenings without saying a word.”

“Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.”

“She had immense eyes that always seemed in danger of capsizing in their own innocence.”

“I was taken a little aback, four or five evenings later, when my father suddenly asked me at dinner how I would like to go to Europe to learn a couple of languages the firm could use. First to Vienna and then maybe to Paris, he said unelaborately.”

“When she sat down, she did the only sensible thing with her beautiful hands there was to be done: she placed them on her lap and left them there. In brief, she was probably the first appreciable thing of beauty I had seen that struck me as wholly legitimate.”

“There was something fantastic and extremely heady about seeing her standing in the pedestrian lobby of the Schwedenkino, and I readily gave up my place in the box-office queue to go to speak to her. But as I charged across the lobby toward her over a number of innocent feet, I saw that she was neither alone nor with a girl friend or someone old enough to be her father.”

“I found out soon after we met that Leah’s father had promised her in marriage to some young Pole. ”

“Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance.”

“At the end of my freshman year of college, back in 1936, I flunked five out of five subjects. ”

“I was always half-eaten away by the respect and happiness when I opened the door for Leah.”

“When I looked at Leah again, her beauty seemed too great for the size of the room. The only way to make room for it was to speak of it.”

“A man can’t go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn’t fit anything.”

“I’ll never forget this time he wanted to do a portrait of me. He always used to say to me - serious as the devil, too - ‘Eddie, you’re not beautiful according to conventional standards, but there’s something in your face I wanna catch.’ Serious as the devil he’d say it, I mean. Well. I only posed for him this once.”

“The way the profile of her face and body refracted in the soupy twilight made me feel a little drunk. When a few seconds had throbbed by, I said hello to her.”