Quote 10
"Couldn’t we live together, Brett? Couldn’t we just live together?"
"I don’t think so. I’d just tromper you with everybody. You couldn’t stand it." (7. 7)
Jake attempts to find some kind of unconventional solution to their no sex problem, but Brett knows herself too well to accept it. Her statement that she’d just tromper (cheat on) Jake with everyone is true, and both of them know it.
Quote 11
"Do you still love me, Jake?"
"Yes," I said.
"Because I’m a goner," Brett said.
"How?"
"I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy. I’m in love with him I think."
"I wouldn’t be if I were you."
"I can’t help it. I’m a goner. It’s tearing me all up inside." (16. 48)
Brett expresses a marked sense of resignation here; she recognizes that her feelings for Romero are actually love, or something akin to it, at least, which she links to death ("I’m a goner"). This reiterates Brett’s earlier claim, in relation to Jake, that love is hell on earth.
Quote 12
"Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
"Yes," I said. "Isn’t it pretty to think so?" (19.60)
This line gets us every time. As the novel closes, Jake doesn’t even have the energy to imagine a happy ending – he knows that he and Brett can’t be together, and now that this possibility has been irrevocably cancelled out, he recognizes that it could never have happened, even in the past. The idea of their relationship is simply a pretty but impossible dream.