F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)

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It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

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
He found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

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
He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.

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
One emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!

F. Scott Fitzgerald
But I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.

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
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
Stahr's eyes and Kathleen's met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

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
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

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