This Side of Paradise Quotes

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there’s a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he’d kissed a girl, every one knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same every one knows it’s because he can’t kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.

The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

The sentimental person thinks things will last – the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.

The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher – a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.

It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life.

I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.

I may turn out an intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.