I learned a little of beauty – enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth – and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.
What had seemed a melancholy happening, now seemed a tiresome anticlimax. HE was dressed at half past, so he sat down by the window; felt that the sinews of his heart were twisted somewhat more than he had thought. What an ironic mockery the morning seemed! – bright and sunny, and full of the smell of the garden...
Thoughts are Things; things that have a tendency to transform into our reality.
ABout three-fourths of the whole business was for effect and therefore harmless, ended at the door of the cafe, soon enough for the five-o’clock train back to Yale or Princeton; about one-fourth continued on into the dimmer hours and gathered strange dust from strange places.
Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring.
At first there would be an American cast to the congress, almost Rotarian in its forms and ceremonies, then the closer-knit European vitality would fight through, and finally the Americans would play their trump card, the announcement of colossal gifts and endowments, of great new plants and training schools, and in the presence of the figures the Europeans would blanch and walk timidly.
They made no love that day, but when he left her outside the sad door on the Zurichsee and she turned and looked at him he knew her problem was one they had together for good now.
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.