Tender is the Night

All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love.

— Tender is the Night

I like France, where everybody thinks he’s Napoleon — down here everybody thinks he’s Christ.

— Tender is the Night

An overwhelming desire to help, or to be admired, came over him.

— Tender is the Night

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

— Tender is the Night

Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.

— Tender is the Night

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing," he said. "Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.

— Tender is the Night

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

— Tender is the Night

Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

— Tender is the Night