Save Me the Waltz

1
“Those girls,” people said, “think they can do anything and get away with it.”

He loved yellow flowers.

If you want to have things, you have got to take care of them.”

When man is no longer custodian of his vanities and convictions, he’s nothing at all, she thought

Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience and find our minds turning then to our exhausted bodies for solace?

Ask me something easy,”

when he was old and had more time to be kindly.

“No—It was the shadows. I am sometimes silly when I am all by myself.”
“I understand,” he soothed. “Grown people are too, very often.”

“It is good to amuse oneself when one can afford it,”

My sitting room in Petrograd was yellow and always full of flowers. I said then to myself, ‘I am too happy. This cannot last.’ ”