It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.
The odd thing is that I’m in love with you anyhow.
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.
The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that.
For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality.
I suppose he smiled at Cody – he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled.
Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and exceptionally, but not conventionally, handsome.
His apprehension of splendor was fading so that presently the luxury of eternal mourning would depart.
Her eyes met Rosemary’s but did not see her.
Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter – as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
I’ve found that I can always do the things that people do in books. Really they are the only things I can do.
In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.
Two souls are sometimes created together and in love before they’re born.
All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified – their senses of humour crawled into corners to sleep;.
Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April.
There was a midsummer restlessness abroad – early August with imprudent loves and impulsive crimes. With little more to expect from summer, one tried anxiously to live in the present – or, if there was no present, to invent one.
Sometimes, when he was particularly loquacious, she went to sleep in his arms, but he loved that Rosalind – all Rosalinds – as he had never in the world loved any one else. Intangibly fleeting, unrememberable hours.
I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!
Listen! The world only exists in your eyes – your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you’re trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked – it’s the Grand Canyon.
In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him.