M.M. Scott Quotes

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.

It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future

I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.

He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and café, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.

She was incurably dishonest.

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

I think they're very attractive,' Abe agreed. 'I just don't think they're attractive, that's all.

He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.

Better let it all alone in the depths of her heart and the depths of the sea.

She admired him; she was used to clutching her hands together in his wake and heaving audible sighs.

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

I'm not much like myself any more.

...their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.

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.

They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.

The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.

but they were frightened at his survivant will, once a will to live, now become a will to die.

I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

Englishmen must have an island.

Once a change of direction has begun, even though it's the wrong one, it still tends to clothe itself as thoroughly in the appurtenances of Tightness as if it had been a natural all along.

i was perhaps an egotist in youth, but i soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself

Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning.

sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy

Fairies: Nature's attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them.

I was too absorbed to be responsive

People living alone get used to loneliness.

For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!

It was strange to have no self-to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.

I just couldn't make the grade as a hack-that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

So there was not an "I" anymore - not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect - save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more.

I don't much care where I am anymore, nor expect very much from places.

Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.

To most women art is a form of scandal.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering

If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type.

Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow.

Debut: the first time a young girl is seen drunk in public.

And will I like being called a jazz-baby? You will love it.

It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.

The things that'll make you fail I'll love always.

We haven’t met for many years, said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be. "Five years next November." The automatic quality set us all back at least another minute.

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.

"What are you going to do?" "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink."

He felt married to her, that was all.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.

Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.

This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding-- it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.