F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)

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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
The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

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

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
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 moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

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 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
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
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and all the beauty in the world.

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

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

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

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.

F. Scott Fitzgerald