Tender Is the Night
CRITIQUE | THE TEXT | THE MOVIE
First editionFirst publication
1934
Literary form
Novel
Genre
Literary
Writing language
English
Author's country
United States
Length
Approx. 119,500 words
Notable lines
First line
On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, rose-colored hotel.
Passages
"New friends," he said as if it were an important point, "can often have a better time together than old friends."
Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors—these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman's face holding his post before a spreading blaze.
I like France, where everybody thinks he’s Napoleon — down here everybody thinks he’s Christ.
"The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing," he said. "Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged."
Last lines
In the last letter she had from him he told her that he was practising in Geneva, New York, and she got the impression that he had settled down with some one to keep house for him. She looked up Geneva in an atlas and found it was in the heart of the Finger Lakes Section and considered a pleasant place. Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant’s in Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.
CRITIQUE | THE TEXT | THE MOVIES
