Tender is the Night Quotes

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives.

You mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat.

Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as “cruelty.”

We are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity – we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity.

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.

The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.

The brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it.

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

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

Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.

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.