Giovanni's Room (Penguin Modern Classics)

‘Anyway,’ he said mildly, ‘I don’t see what you can do with little fish except eat them. What else are they good for?’ ‘In my country,’ I said, feeling a subtle war within me as I said it, ‘the little fish seem to have gotten together and are nibbling at the body of the whale.’ ‘That will not make them whales,’ said Giovanni. ‘The only result of al

Then Jacques spoke, at my elbow. ‘Everyone in the bar,’ he said, ‘is talking about how beautifully you and the barman have hit it off.’ He gave me a radiant and vindictive smile.

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who rememb

There were the usual paunchy, bespectacled gentlemen with avid, sometimes despairing eyes, the usual, knife-blade lean, tight-trousered boys. One could never be sure, as concerns these latter, whether they were after money or blood or love. They moved about the bar incessantly, cadging cigarettes and drinks, with something behind their eyes at once

‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like—many years from now.’ ‘Many years from now? When we are dead and New York is old?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When everyone is tired, when the world—for Americans—is not so ne

I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

I did not dare to mention Hella. I could not even pretend to myself that I was sorry she was in Spain. I was glad. I was utterly, hopelessly, horribly glad. I knew I could do nothing whatever to stop the ferocious excitement which had burst in me like a storm. I could only drink, in the faint hope that the storm might thus spend itself without doin

My father had money in his account which belonged to me but he was very reluctant to send it because he wanted me to come home—to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond.

He hesitated a moment and then grinned, suddenly looking rather boyish and shy. ‘It’s cold in the winter,’ he said. ‘I don’t like that. And Parisians—I do not find them so very friendly, do you?’ He did not wait for my answer. ‘They are not like the people I knew when I was younger. In Italy we are friendly, we dance and sing and make love—but thes