She looks at him once more, with infinite longing, infinite sadness.
They had senselessly begun to abuse each other’s love, tear it into shreds.
The ‘belle’ had become the ‘flirt’, the ‘flirt’ had become the ‘baby vamp’.
As the new alcohol tumbled into his stomach and warmed him, the isolated pictures began slowly to form a cinema reel of the day before.
Don’t misunderstand! Amory ad loved Rosalind as he would never love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depth tenderness that had surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature. He had later affairs, but of a different sort: in those he went back to that, perhaps, more typical frame of mind, in which the girl became the mirror of a mood in him.
My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.
Suddenly he felt an overwhelming desire to let himself go to the devil – not to go violently as a gentleman should, but to slip safely and sensuously out of sight.
A bad driver is only safe until she met another bad driver.
The education of all beautiful women is the knowledge of men.
Isabella had been for some time capable of very strong, if very transient emotions...
All impressions and, in fact, all ideas were extremely kaleidoscopic to Isabelle. She had that curious mixture of the social and the artistic temperaments found often in two classes, society women and actresses.
And then when I’d begun to feel that after all life was scarcely worth living I found something” – her eyes went skyward exultantly – “I found something!
To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him.
He made no self-accusations: never any more did he reproach himself for feelings that were natural and sincere. He accepted all his reactions as a part of him, unchangeable, unmoral.
You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in this “woman proposition”; but it’s more than that, Amory; it’s the fear that what you begin you can’t stop; you would run amuck, and I know whereof I speak; it’s that half-miraculous sixth sense by which you detect evil, it’s the half-realized fear of God in your heart.
And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life – not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.
So the men did, and they died.
A very confused, very juvenile moment of awkward backings and bumpings followed, and everyone found himself talking to the person he least desired to. Isabella manoeuvred herself and Froggy Parker, freshman at Harvard, with whom she had once played hop-scotch, to a seat on the stairs. A humorous reference to the past was all she needed. The things Isabelle could do socially with one idea were remarkable.
Jay Gatsby: Old sport.
From the first Amory loved Princeton – its lazy beauty, its half-grasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of the rushes, the handsome, prosperous big-game crowds.