Tender Is the Night Quotes

“Strange children should smile at each other and say, “Let’s play.”

“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.”

“Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don’t call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.”

“She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.”

“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.”

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”

“In any case you mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat.”

“I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.”

“She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.”

“New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.”

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”

“When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It’s better to be cold and young than to love.”

“Dick didn’t want to talk – he wanted to be alone so that his thoughts about work and the future would overpower his thoughts of love and to-day.”

“I fell in love on the beach,” said Rosemary. “Who with?” “First with a whole lot of people who looked nice. Then with one man”

″...For Doctor Diver to marry a mental patient? How did it happen? Where did it begin?”

“I’m afraid I’m in love with you,’ said Dick, ‘and that’s not the best thing that could happen”

“So many smart men go to pieces nowadays.” “And when haven’t they?” Dick asked. “Smart men play close to the line because they have to – some of them can’t stand it, so they quit”

“He supposed many men meant no more than that when they said they were in love – not a wild submergence of soul, a dipping of all colors into an obscuring dye, such as his love for Nicole had been. Certain thoughts about Nicole, that she should die, sink into mental darkness, love another man, made him physically sick.”

“You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”

“I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”

“People living alone get used to loneliness.”