F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)

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

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

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
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
For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
We haven't met for many years, said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be. "Five years next November." The automatic quality set us all back at least another minute.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I can't exactly describe how I feel but it's not quite right. And it leaves me cold.

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

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

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

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alivewith chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
What do you think of that? It's stopped raining." I'm glad Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.

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
His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

F. Scott Fitzgerald