The night had made a sharp difference in the weather and there was an autumn flavor in the air.
This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.
He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of civilization. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on a city street – and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art – and he was a virtual moron, performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of threescore years.
In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house – the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.
Well I’ve had a very bad time, Nick, and I’m pretty cynical about everything.
It was a body capable of enormous leverage – a cruel body.
He was conscious of the print of her wet foot on a rug through the bathroom door.
I possess the most valuable experience, the experience of the race, for in spite of going to college I’ve managed to pick up a good education.
Amory smiled discreetly... ‘But beware the artist who’s an intellectual also. The artist who doesn’t fit – the Rousseau, the Tolstoi, the Samuel Butler, the Amory Blaine-.
Amory said to himself that there were essentially two sorts of people who through natural clarity or disillusion left the enclosure and sought the labyrinth.
There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes;.
Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.
As for the well-known Amory, he would write immortal literature if he were sure enough to risk telling anyone else about it. There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.
Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!
Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
People like us can’t adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is concerned – we’d just make asses of ourselves.
I know I’m not a regular fellow, yet I loathe anybody else that isn’t.
He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in and never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out.
Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
There’s nothing I’d violate certain principles for.” “But how do you know when you’re violating them? You have to guess at things just like most people do. You have to apportion the values when you look back. You finish up the portrait then – paint in the details and shadows.