I forgot to add that I liked old men---men over seventy, sometimes over sixty if their face looked seasoned.
It seemed on one March afternoon that I had lost every single thing I wanted---and that night was the first time
that I hunted down the spectre of womanhood that, for a little while, makes everything else seem unimportant.
I really loved him, but of course it wore out like a love affair. The fairies have all spoiled that.
The city's quick metropolitan rhythm of love and birth and death that supplied dreams to the unimaginative,
pageantry and drama to the drab.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There's no other definition of it.
When he buys his ties he has to ask if gin will make them run.
A lovely dress, soft and gentle in cut, but in color a hard, bright, metallic powder blue.
Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
Basil's heart went bobbing around the ballroom in a pink silk dress.
His hair was grey at thirty-five, but people said the usual things---that it made him handsomer and all that, and
he never thought much about it, even though early grey hair didn't run in his family.
His mannerisms were all girls' mannerisms, rather gentle considerations got from girls, or restrained and made
masculine, a trait that, far from being effeminate, gave him a sort of Olympian stature that, in its all-kindness and
consideration, was masculine and feminine alike.
He had once been a pederast and he had perfected a trick of writing about all his affairs as if his boy friends had
been girls, thus achieving feminine types of a certain spurious originality.
When I like men I want to be like them---I want to lose the outer qualities that give me my individuality and be
like them. I don't want the man; I want to absorb into myself all the qualities that make him attractive and leave
him out.
Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby my imaginary eldest brother, Amory my younger, Anthony
my worry, Dick my comparitively good brother, but all of them far from home.
He had long forgotten whether Darrow called Scopes a monkey or Bryan called Darrow a scope or why Leopold
-Loeb was ever tried in the first place.
Cocktails before meals like Americans, wines and brandies like Frenchmen, beer like Germans, whiskey-and-soda like the English, and, as they were no longer in the twenties, this preposterous melange, that was like some
gigantic cocktail in a nightmare.
You can take your choice between God and Sex. If you choose both, you're a smug hypocrite; if neither, you get
nothing.
The reason morons can stand good entertainment is that they don't like to understand all the time...Something they could follow all through is a stirring nervous experience for them. Through a good picture they can drowse
---as morons always drowse mentally through great events.
A chapter in which their kid comes to him for homosexuality, and a consequent long consideration of
homosexuality from some such attitude as a Groton father thinking it's maybe all right for social reasons.
So I enclosed you two pictures, well give one to some poor motherless Poilu fairy who has no dream.
We begin with the suggestion that Don Juan leads an interesting life (Jurgen, 1919); then we learn that there's a
lot of sex around if we only knew it (Winesburg, Ohio, 1920), that adolescents lead very amorous lives (This
Side of Paradise, 1920), that there are a lot of neglected Anglo-Saxon words (Ulysses, 1921), that older people
don't always resist sudden temptations (Cytherea, 1922), that girls are sometimes seduced without being ruined
(Flaming Youth, 1922), that even rape often turns out well (The Sheik, 1922), that glamorous English ladies are
often promiscuous (The Green Hat, 1924), that in fact they devote most of their time to it (The Vortex, 1926),
that it's a damn good thing too (Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1928), and finally that there are abnormal variations
(The Well of Loneliness, 1928, and Sodom and Gomorrah, 1929).
Back in 1920 I shocked a rising young business man by suggesting a cocktail before lunch, In 1929 there was
liquor in half the downtown offices, and a speakeasy in half the large buildings.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still
retain the ability to function.
The slicker was good-looking or clean-looking; he had brains, social brains that is, and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to get ahead, be popular, admired and never in trouble. He dressed well, was particularly neat in appearance and derived his name from the fact that his hair was inevitably worn short, soaked in water or tonic, parted in the middle and slicked back as the current fashion dictated.
Amory liked him for being clever and literary without effeminacy or affectation. In fact Amory did most of the strutting and tried painfully to make every remark an epigram, than which, if one is content with ostensible epigrams, there are many feats harder.
Kerry read "Dorian Gray" and simulated Lord Henry, following Amory about, addressing him as "Dorian" and pretending to encourage in him wicked fancies and attenuated tendencies to ennui.
You've just had your eyes opened to the snobbishness of the world in a rather abrupt manner. Princeton invariably gives the thoughtful man a social sense.
Well then don't spoil it. If I enjoy going around telling people guilelessly that I think I'm a genius, then let me do it.
Why is it that the pick of the young Englishmen from Oxford and Cambridge go into politics and in the USA we leave it to the muckers?...Sometimes I wish I'd been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy.
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 Nietzche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away.
Yet all thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: Benson and Chesterton had popularized Huysmans and Newman; Shaw had sugar-coated Nietzche and Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the street heard the conclusions of dead genius through someone else's clever and didactic epigrams.
Fifty years after Waterloo Napoleon was as much a hero to English schoolchildren as Wellington---How do we know our grandchildren won't idolize Von Hindenburg the same way?