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21 " I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Great Gatsby
22 " No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. "
23 " There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. "
24 " The tears coursed down her cheeks- not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. "
25 " 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. "
26 " I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life. "
27 " Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. "
28 " I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't change the past.''Can't change the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can! "
29 " He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. "
30 " I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. "
31 " Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men. "
32 " If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away. "
33 " Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization. "
34 " Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. "
35 " The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun. "
36 " I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. "
37 " Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. "
38 " The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby. "
39 " My own rule is to let everything alone. "
40 " As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone. "