"He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. 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. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."
"I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye."
"It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply-I was casually sorry, and then I forgot." (me: are you kidding me??)
"...she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow thinking and full of interior rules that act like brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home."
"Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."
"...with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europe..."
"No amount of fire or freshness canchallenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."
"For a while these reveries provided an outlet of 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."
"It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment."
"...scarcely human orchid of a woman..."
“For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man´s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”
“Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn´t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?”
"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."
"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 one fine morning--
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
