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81 " What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years? "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Great Gatsby
82 " 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. "
83 " 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. "
84 " Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. "
85 " Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For awhile 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. "
86 " 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. "
87 " 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. [- Nick Carroway] "
88 " 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. "
89 " He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. "
90 " The rich get richer and the poor get - children. "
91 " So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing. "
92 " 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. "
93 " It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment. "
94 " Murder your darlings. "
95 " Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. "
96 " I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands. "
97 " They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep. "
98 " I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor "
99 " They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. "
100 " People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. "