They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.
I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
I like France, where everybody thinks he’s Napoleon – down here everybody thinks he’s Christ.
He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall.
He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.
I want leisure to read – an immense amount.
Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.
He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.
Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
Nancy had a mouth like a remembered kiss...
The things that’ll make you fail I’ll love always.
It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.
It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future.
The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the unclear voices of children, already gathered like crikets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight.
You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.
Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.
I am a woman and my business is to hold things together. My business is to tear them apart.
They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.
There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.
Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m real or whether I’m a character in one of my novels.