What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe – why, intelligence never built a steam-engine! Circumstances built a steam-engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.
And then, one fairy night, May became June.
People fall in and out of love all the time. I wonder how they manage it.
Their hands touched for an instant, but neither spoke. Silences were becoming more frequent and more delicious.
You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.
With people like us our home is where we are not.
Suddenly he was inside the radius of her perfume and kissing her breathlessly.
He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house.
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.
Their eyes met, locked, became wistful, and dreamy and beautiful.
I knew that what was left of me would always love you, but never in quite the same way.
The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a failure.
Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss anyone; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide somewhere safe out of sight, up in the corner of his mind.
There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully – assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.
At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness.
There were girls who would tear you apart with their lips.
You can’t repeat the past.
Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her.
Her bedroom had seemed so pink and young and delicate, appropriate to her pastel-shaded lingerie tossed here and there on chair and bed.
Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.