She had been kissed once and made love to six times.
If one can’t be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to be a great criminal.
I’m more beautiful than anybody else,” she said brokenly, “why can’t I be happy?
I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove.
All right,” I said, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
I don’t ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn.
But his eyes, dimmed by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
I’m one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills but getting few myself except those I read into men on nights such as these.
My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis – a moulding of the confusion of life into form.
I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something- most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning.
But the rest offended her – and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion.
You’re very polite, but I belong to another generation.
He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American – that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games.
That’s my middle-west – not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.
Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.
I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table – the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.
Doctor Dougall was wrong. It was tempermentally impossible for Amory to get the best marks in school.