Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on – I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done. He’s a bar on which a thousand things have been hung – glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.
Gradually he realized that he was really walking up University Place, self-conscious about his suitcase, developing a new tendency to glare straight ahead when he passed any one.
Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.
He was born sleepless without a talent for rest or the desire for it.” – Cecelia Brady about Stahr.
It was themselves he gave back to them, blurred by the compromises of how many years.
It was the same feeling that had oppressed her at the hotel – accustomed to seeing the starkest grotesqueries of a continent heavily underlined as comedy or tragedy, untrained to the task of separating out the essential for herself, she now began to feel that French life was empty and stale.
All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love.
Americans were saying good-by in voices that mimicked the cadence of water running into a large old bathtub.
One of the pilots asked Mr. Smith if he liked his business, and Mr. Smith said, “Sure. Sure I like it. It’s nice being the only sound nut in a hatful of cracked ones.” – Stewardess to Cecelia Brady.
The very weather seems to have a quality of the past, faded weather like that of old photographs.
My dear boy, there’s your big mistake. This has nothing to do with will-power; that’s a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack judgement – the judgement to decide at once when you know your imagination will play you false, given half a chance.
As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets.
It was good to be hard, then; all nice people were hard on themselves.
They ate sandwiches of mortadel sausage and bel paese cheese made up in the station restaurant, and drank Beaujolais.
No,′ she said; ‘I’d never marry again. I’ve got my two children and I want myself for them. I like you – I like all clever men, you more than any – but you know me well enough to know that I’d never marry a clever man – ’ She broke off suddenly.
Oh, Clara!′ Amory said; ’what a devil you could have been if the Lord had just bent your soul a little the other way!
When a girl comes out, she needs all the attention.
General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.” “No, he didn’t – he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle – there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.
Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands.
When I hear a man proclaiming himself an “average, honest, open fellow,” I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal – and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision.