He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a code that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such reformed rakes of literature as Huysmans and Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram, with his adulation of thirteenth-century cathedrals – a Catholicism which Amory found convenient and ready-made, without priest or sacraments or sacrifice.
It’s the whole thing,′ he asserted. ‘It’s the one dividing line between good and evil. I’ve never met a man who led a rotten life and didn’t have a weak will.
I think that voice held him most with its fluctuating feverish warmth because it couldn’t be over-dreamed.
To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him.” This sentence was the thesis of most of his bad nights, of which he felt this was to be one. His mind had already started to play variations on the subject. Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush – these alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth – bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love’s exaltation.
She could make fascinating and almost brilliant conversation out of the thinnest air that ever floated through a drawing-room.
It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.
The odd thing is that I’m in love with you anyhow.
Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering.
The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that.
For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality.
I suppose he smiled at Cody – he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled.
Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and exceptionally, but not conventionally, handsome.
His apprehension of splendor was fading so that presently the luxury of eternal mourning would depart.
Her eyes met Rosemary’s but did not see her.
Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter – as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
I’ve found that I can always do the things that people do in books. Really they are the only things I can do.
In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.
Two souls are sometimes created together and in love before they’re born.
All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified – their senses of humour crawled into corners to sleep;.
Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April.