Author Anna Godbersen is known for her beautiful prose, and dreamlike descriptions of eras past; thus, it’s no surprise that we find ourselves quoting her work long after we’ve turned the last page. In honor of this month’s paperback release of Beautiful Days: A Bright Young Things Novel, the second title in her unputdownable Roaring Twenties series, we’re giving you a heaping dose of our favorite Bright Young Things quotes!

1. “It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer. Everything fades: the shimmer of gold over White Cove; the laughter in the night air; the lavender early morning light on the faces of skyscrapers, which had suddenly become so heroically tall. Every dawn seemed to promise fresh miracles, among other joys that are in short supply these days. And so I will try to tell you, while I still remember, how it was then, before everything changed-that final season of the era that roared.”

2. “All really interesting girls invent themselves.”

3. “Love is all right, as things go, but lovers can be a terrible waste of a girl’s time.”

4. “That is what I want to tell you about: the girls with their short skirts and bright eyes and big-city dreams. The girls of 1929.”

5. “It is often advantageous to forget. Forget your wincing humiliations, forget life’s blows, and get on. For blocks in every direction, down every street in the city, people not yet old enough to have lines on their foreheads were laughing away memory, warmly ensconced in shrines of forgetfulness. Those who followed the word of God and those who preferred what the priests called ‘hoodoo’ alike. People everywhere forgetting with drink or forgetting with religion or forgetting with the numbing quality of their many heaps of things. They looked forward and imagined rosy tomorrows, and gave up whatever horrors heckled their dreams, and listened to the pretty stories of whomever ruled their pulpit.”

6. “Among her other talents were forgetting what she did not like and ignoring what she preferred not to see.”

7. “‘Interesting’ people were her favorite hobby. She collected them: the type who did gay things late at night and smoked cigarettes in mixed company, those would have most scandalized her own mother.”

8. “Girls took to dressing like boys, and though women had obtained the vote, we had swiftly moved on to pursuing flashier freedoms: necking in cars and smoking cigarettes and walking down city streets in flesh colored stockings.”

Beautiful Days: A Bright Young Things Novel makes its paperback debut in bookstores on July 31, 2012; read an excerpt here.