But the army – let me see – well, I discovered that physical courage depends to a great extent on the physical shape a man is in. I found that I was as brave as the next man – it used to worry me before.
Assim vamos persistindo, como barcos contra a corrente, incessantemente levados de volta ao passado.
It had been a gay party and different stages of sobriety were represented.
Rosalind: Cecelia, darling, you don’t know what a trial it is to be like me. I’ve got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me. If I laugh hard from a front row in the theatre, the comedian plays to me for the rest of the evening. If I drop my voice, my eyes, my handkerchief at a dance, my partner calls me up on the phone every day for a week.
You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I?
But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.
Everything was hallowed by the haze of his own youth.
Ci sono soltanto perseguitati e persecutori, affaccendati e stanchi.
What had seemed a melancholy happening, now seemed a tiresome anticlimax. HE was dressed at half past, so he sat down by the window; felt that the sinews of his heart were twisted somewhat more than he had thought. What an ironic mockery the morning seemed! – bright and sunny, and full of the smell of the garden...
Why are all the exciting things so uncomfortable? Like fighting and exploring and skiing in Canada?
Thoughts are Things; things that have a tendency to transform into our reality.
ABout three-fourths of the whole business was for effect and therefore harmless, ended at the door of the cafe, soon enough for the five-o’clock train back to Yale or Princeton; about one-fourth continued on into the dimmer hours and gathered strange dust from strange places.
Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring.
At first there would be an American cast to the congress, almost Rotarian in its forms and ceremonies, then the closer-knit European vitality would fight through, and finally the Americans would play their trump card, the announcement of colossal gifts and endowments, of great new plants and training schools, and in the presence of the figures the Europeans would blanch and walk timidly.
They made no love that day, but when he left her outside the sad door on the Zurichsee and she turned and looked at him he knew her problem was one they had together for good now.
He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a code that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such reformed rakes of literature as Huysmans and Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram, with his adulation of thirteenth-century cathedrals – a Catholicism which Amory found convenient and ready-made, without priest or sacraments or sacrifice.
It’s the whole thing,′ he asserted. ‘It’s the one dividing line between good and evil. I’ve never met a man who led a rotten life and didn’t have a weak will.
I think that voice held him most with its fluctuating feverish warmth because it couldn’t be over-dreamed.
To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him.” This sentence was the thesis of most of his bad nights, of which he felt this was to be one. His mind had already started to play variations on the subject. Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush – these alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth – bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love’s exaltation.
She could make fascinating and almost brilliant conversation out of the thinnest air that ever floated through a drawing-room.