He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
Similar topics in Freebase
-
It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
-
Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
-
In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
-
Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.
-
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
-
Her voice is full of money.
-
The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
-
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 are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or 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.
-
No such thing as a man willing to be honest --that would be like a blind man willing to see.
