Home > Work > The Great Gatsby
41 " 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 , The Great Gatsby
42 " one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture. "
43 " I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. "
44 " Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures. "
45 " but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. "
46 " Most of the big shore places were closed now. And there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of the ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away till gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes, A fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. For a transitory, enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent. Face to face, for the last time in history, with something commensurate to its capacity for wonder. "
47 " ...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 "
48 " She was appalled by West Egg’s raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that eroded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand. "
49 " 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. "
50 " It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people. "
51 " 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. "
52 " 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. "
53 " 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 the beauty in the world. "
54 " I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. "
55 " The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. "
56 " 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. "
57 " Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face. "
58 " It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. "
59 " Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. "
60 " Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can! "