F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)

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It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of the windows downstairs, filling the house with gray-turning, gold-turning light. The Shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a slow, pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool, lovely day.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.

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
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
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
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
Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed —that voice was a deathless song.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
That's the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I hope she'll be a fool — that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. You always look so cool," she repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It makes me sad because I've never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
She's got an indiscreet voice, I remarked. It's full of- I hesitated. Her voice is full of money, he said suddenly. That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money-that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
She wouldn't let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up in a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.

F. Scott Fitzgerald