15 Quotes by Alfred Hayes

All I knew, really, was that she had taken away with her when she had gone something which in the past had held me together, some necessary sense of myself... For without whatever it was, I seemed poor, depleted, injured in some mysterious way; without it, there was nothing to interpose between the world and me.

The sick constriction of the heart was undeniable; there was a melancholy truth in the fact that it was suffering which made me, I thought, at last real to myself.

She inhabited a world from which I was excluded, and she had left me in an immense empty space.

There were times when I would forget her, though they were rare, and it would be for a time as though she had never existed; and then some passing girl's inadvertent gesture, or an accidental profile, or a hat like hers, would restore her, and restore the suffering too, and I would long again, somehow, to encounter or to see her.

Al fin y al cabo, ¿no es lo que queremos?Las cosas en su lugar; cierto orden; una sensación de bienestar, verdadera o falsa, una tarde en la que suceda algo.

porque nada de lo que deseamos ocurre exactamente como lo deseamos, amor o metas o hijos, y de desilusión en desilusión vamos de la esperanza a la negación, de la expectativa a la renuncia, y al envejecer pensamos o llegamos a pensar que el error estuvo en desear con una intensidad

Sabía que ella quería lo que yo no estaba dispuesto a darle: una ilusión de seguridad, la idea de estar protegida. Por ser hermosa, ella esperaba las recompensas que trae la belleza, por lo menos algunas; no se era hermosa en vano en un mundo que insistía en que lo más importante para una chica era ser hermosa

Your only vice is yourself. The worst of all. The really incurable one.

I really didn’t have a good vice. Liquor in moderate quantities. Love on the installment plan. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could really cultivate some impressive vice? Some excessive cruelty or some astonishing sacrifice.