- “There are only the
pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
- “I wasn’t actually
in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
- “So we beat on,
boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
- “In my younger and
more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over
in my mind ever since.
- “It’s a great
advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any
one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world
haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” - “You see I usually
find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the
sad things that happened to me.”
- “Life starts all
over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
- “I hope she’ll be a
fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little
fool.”
- “Angry, and half in
love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
- “Let us learn to
show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
- 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 eternal 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.”
- “And I like large
parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
- “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.”
- “If personality is
an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous
about him”
- “No amount of fire
or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly
heart.”
- “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.”
- “I couldn’t forgive
him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely
justified. It was all very careless and confused. 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.”
- “I was within and
without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
- “Every one 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.”
- “They’re a rotten
crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put
together.”
- “All I kept
thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live
forever.”
- “He looked at her
the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”
