The thing about real life is that important events don't announce themselves... Usually something that is going to change your whole life is a memory before you can stop and be impressed about it.

The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaiety, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

Here lies the bottom and root of all contentment, when there is an evenness and proportion between our hearts and our circumstances.

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

But in the meantime all the life you have or ever will have is today, tonight, tomorrow, today, tonight, tomorrow, over and over again (I hope), ...

But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

No, he thought, when everything you do, you do too long, and do too late, you can't expect to find the people still there. The people all are gone. The party's over and you are with your hostess now. I'm getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.

It is the fault of the orders, which are too rigid. There is no allowance for a change in circumstance.

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. [...] Part of you died each year when leaves fell from the tress and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.