“In a moment he would call Tana and they would pour into themselves a gay and delicate poison which would restore them momentarily to the pleasurable excitement of childhood, when every face in a crowd had carried its suggestion of splendid and significant transactions taking place somewhere to some magnificent and illimitable purpose...Life was no more than this summer afternoon; a faint wind stirring the lace collar of Gloria's dress, the slow baking drowsiness of the veranda...Intolerably unmoved they all seemed, removed from any romantic imminency of action. Even Gloria's beauty needed wild emotions, needed poignancy, needed death...” BeautySweet Poison Book:The Beautiful and Damned Source: The Beautiful and Damned
“There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings. After a few high-balls there was magic in the tall glowing Arabian night of the Bush Terminal Building - its summit a peak of sheer grandeur, gold and dreaming against the inaccessible sky. And Wall Street, the crass, the banal - again it was a triumph of gold, a gorgeous sentient spectacle; it was where the great kings kept the moment for their wars... ...The fruit of youth, or the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.” LifeTruthBeautyPoignancySweet Poison Book:The Beautiful and Damned Source: The Beautiful and Damned