The Beautiful and Damned Quotes

“Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot. And when I got it it turned to dust in my hands.”

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me you’d better go.”

“She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.”

“I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”

“His mind tired--tired with nothing, tired with everything, with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”

“We all have souls of different ages.”

“I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.”

“All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.”

“A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She’s too pretty.”

“Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it’s a wall that an active you runs up against.”

“Unloved women have no biographies--they have histories.”

“He had never met anyone like her before. He sought her jauntily but earnestly to send him away; he didn’t want to fall in love. He wasn’t coming to see her any more--already she had haunted too many of his ways.”

“A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.”

“‘Dear little Dot, life is so damned hard.’
She was crying upon his shoulder.
‘So damned hard, so damned hard,’ he repeated aimlessly; ‘it just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.’”

“How I feel is that if I wanted anything I’d take it. That’s what I’ve always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven’t room for any other desires.”

“What delicious romance! His true reaction was neither fear nor sorrow--only this deep delight in being with her that colored the banality of his words and made the mawkish seem sad and the posturing seem wise. He would come back--eternally. He should have known!”

“Gloria’s independence, like all sincere and profound qualities, had begun unconsciously, but, once brought to her attention by Anthony’s fascinated discovery of it, it assumed more nearly the proportions of a formal code. From her conversation it might be assumed that all her energy and vitality went into a violent affirmation of the negative principle ‘Never give a damn.’”

“Everywhere we go and move on and change, something’s lost--something’s left behind. You can’t ever quite repeat anything, and I’ve been so yours, here--”

“All I think of ever is that I love you.”

“You can’t have anything, you can’t have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it--but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone--”