The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap.
I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream, He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is...
I feel sure we are the great coming nation – yet” – and she sighed – “I feel my life should have drowsed away close to an older, mellower civilization, a land of greens and autumnal browns –.
It was growing colder and the men passing had flipped up the collars of their overcoats.
Only Maury Noble remained awake, seated upon the station roof, his eyes wide open and fixed with fatigued intensity upon the distant nucleus of morning. He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house.
It is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before.
He was in an eddy again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire to work or write, love or dissipate.
His expression combined that of a Middle-western farmer appraising his wheat-crop and that of an actor wondering whether he is observed – the public manner of all good Americans.
Goodnight, child. This is a damn shame. Let’s drop it out of the picture.” He gave her two lines of hospital patter to go to sleep on. “So many people are going to love you and it might be nice to meet your first love all intact, emotionally too. That’s an old-fashioned idea, isn’t it?
Don’t say wife. I’m your mistress. Wife’s such un ugly word.
Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hand on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.
Young men just don’t drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island.
What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacing back and forth, its disastrous retreats!
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven halfway between death and immortality.
It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the habit of reading in bed – it soothed him.
My thu-umb!” explained Julie. “Oh-h-h-h, t’urts.
She seems hopeful and normally hungry for life – even rather romantic.
A delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free.
And then in a jiffy he was under the high ceiling of his great front room. This was entirely satisfactory. Here, after all, life began. Here he slept, breakfasted, read and entertained.
Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remarks the futility of themselves.