Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known – and even that is an understatement.
He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.
A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She’s too pretty.
But you can love more than just one person, can’t you?
I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.
We all must try to be good.
Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.
I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.
So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight – watching over nothing.
But I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.
Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.
And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.
All that kept her from breaking was that it was not an image of strength that was leaving her; she would be just as strong without him.
Better let it all alone in the depths of her heart and the depths of the sea.
It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life.
His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.
He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.