Ruby Grace

“The - pan-ic - " he began but got no further, for Gloria's hand swung around swiftly and caught him in the cheek. At this he all at once let go of her, and she fell to the floor, her shoulder hitting the table a glancing blow in transit...
Then the room seemed full of men and smoke. There was Tana in his white coat reeling about supported by Maury. Into his flute he was blowing a weird blend of sound that was known, cried Anthony, as the Japanese train song. Joe Hull had found a box of candles and was juggling them, yelling "One down!" every time he missed, and Dick was dancing by himself in a fascinated whirl around and about the room. It appeared to her that everything in the room was staggering in a grotesque fourth-dimensional gyrations through intersecting planes of hazy blue.
Outside the storm had come up amazingly - the lulls within were filled with the scrape of the tall bushes against the house and the roaring of the rain on the tin roof of the kitchen.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Gloria had lulled Anthony's mind to sleep. She, who seemed of all women the wisest and the finest, hung like a brilliant curtain across his doorways, shutting out the light of the sun. In those first few years what he believed bore invariably the stamp of Gloria; he saw the sun always through the pattern of the curtain.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I've often thought that if I hadn't got what I wanted things might have been different with me. I might have found something in my mind and enjoyed putting it in circulation. I might have been content with the work of it, and had some sweet vanity out of the success. I suppose that at one time I could have had anything I wanted, within reason, but that was the only thing that I wanted with any fervour. God! And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about the room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone-”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“...I was lost with the rest. I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned