This Side of Paradise

That had been his nearest approach to success through conformity. The fundamental Amory, idle, imaginative, rebellious, had been nearly snowed under. He had conformed, he had succeeded, but as his imagination was neither satisfied nor grasped by his own success, he had listlessly, half-accidentally chucked the whole thing and become again:
6. The fundamental Amory.

I’m tres old and tres bored, Tom

… Well this side of Paradise! …
There’s little comfort in the wise.
Rupert Brooke

Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde

I’ve always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.

Whenever Amory was submerged, his vanity was the last part to go below the surface, so he could still enjoy a comfortable glow when “Wookey-wookey,” the deaf old housekeeper, told him that he was the best-looking boy she had ever seen.

He and Monsignor held the floor, and the older man, with his less receptive, less accepting, yet certainly not colder mentality, seemed content to listen and bask in the mellow sunshine that played between these two.

“So your mother says—a remarkable woman; have a cigarette—I’m sure you smoke. Well, if you’re like me, you loathe all science and mathematics—”

Amory nodded vehemently.

“Hate ’em all. Like English and history.”

He was intensely ritualistic, startlingly dramatic, loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate, and rather liked his neighbor.

there was a great and constantly increasing family of white cats that prowled the many flowerbeds and were silhouetted suddenly at night against the darkening trees.