Their eyes met, locked, became wistful, and dreamy and beautiful.
I knew that what was left of me would always love you, but never in quite the same way.
The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a failure.
Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss anyone; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide somewhere safe out of sight, up in the corner of his mind.
There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully – assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.
At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness.
There were girls who would tear you apart with their lips.
You can’t repeat the past.
Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her.
Her bedroom had seemed so pink and young and delicate, appropriate to her pastel-shaded lingerie tossed here and there on chair and bed.
Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.
The sea, he thought, had treasured its memories deeper than the faithless land.
There was the starlight set upon the brilliant darkness; and there were her pale cool cheeks, and he let himself be lost in love for her, as he had so wanted to do.
He drew her very tenderly close and their lips met like starved hearts.
All the bright precious things fade so fast.
You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow. Everybody thinks so – the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. Sophisticated – God, I’m sophisticated!
That’s my theory: immediate electrocution of all ignorant and dirty people. I’m all for the criminals – give color to life. Trouble is if you started to punish ignorance you’d have to begin in the first families, then you could take up the moving-picture people, and finally Congress and the clergy.
When people have so much for outsiders didn’t it indicate a lack of inner intensity?
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.