F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)

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So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes-there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Want any of this stuff? Jordan?... Nick?" I didn't answer. Nick?" he asked again. What?" Want any?" No... I just remembered that today's my birthday." I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
But there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires....

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. - The Great Gatsby.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm thirty, I said. I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them-with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro's troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances, which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro's warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them—always thinking people are so important—especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it—on the inside.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
'What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?' cried Daisy, 'and the day after that, and the next thirty years?'

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Then she added in a sort of childish delight: 'We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!' She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss. 'It's impossible to be both together,' said John grimly. 'People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two...

F. Scott Fitzgerald
All the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

F. Scott Fitzgerald