Grown-ups didn’t seem to realize that for me, as for most other schoolboys, it was easier to keep silent than to speak. I was a natural oyster.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Not Adam and Eve, after eating the apple, could have been more upset than I was.
The conversation of the gods! – I didn’t resent or feel aggrieved because I couldn’t understand it. I was the smallest of the planets, and if I carried messages between them and I couldn’t always understand, that was in order too: they were something in a foreign language – star-talk.
I had never met a lord before, nor had I ever expected to meet one. It didn’t matter what he looked like: he was a lord first, and a human being, with a face and limbs and body, long, long after.
I should not have cared to see it as an act of self-sacrifice even if it had been one; for there is nothing clever in self-sacrifice, nothing to pride oneself on.
It’s better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.
You insisted on thinking of them as angels, even if they were fallen angels.
My dream had become my reality: my old life was a discarded husk.
To see things as they really were – what an empoverishment!
Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections.
Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.