Great Throughts Treasury

"He was figuratively following along beside her as she walked the fence, ready to catch her if she should fall."

"He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis - these had been his ingredients when he entered St. Regis'. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay to conceal the Amory plus Beatrice from the ferreting eyes of a boarding school, so St. Regis' had very painfully drilled Beatrice out of him and begun to lay down new and more conventional planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis' and Amory were unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself changed. Those qualities for which he had suffered: his moodiness, his tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the St. Regis' Tattler; it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very vanities that had not long ago been contemptible weaknesses."

"He was good looking, sort of distinguished when he wants to be, had a line, and was properly inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environment led her to desire"

"He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and café, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon."

"He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years."

"He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy."

"He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house"

"He wondered idly whether she was a poor conversationalist because she got no attention or got no attention because she was a poor conversationalist."

"He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized."

"He was safe in here from all the threat of life."

"HeÂ’s quite as nervously broken down as I am, but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy."

"HeÂ’s a bootleggerÂ….One time he killed a man who found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil."

"Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered Listen, a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour."

"Her fine high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet and shining, the colour of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood -- she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her."

"Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing them: Love, Nick, and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free."

"Her hair, drawn back off her ears, brushed her shoulders in such a way that the face seemed to have just emerged from it, as if this were the exact moment when she was coming from a wood into clear moonlight. The unknown yielded her up; Dick wished she had no background, that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from which she had come."

"Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven-a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax."

"Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others."

"Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower."

"HeÂ’s so dumb he doesnÂ’t know heÂ’s alive."

"Her beautiful eyes and lips were very grave as she made her choice, and Anthony thought again how naive was her every gesture; she took all the things of life for hers to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter."

"Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains..."

"Her voice is full of money, he said suddenly."

"Her voice is full of money."

"Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."

"Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water, lisping its music and bearing a burden of light, bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughterÂ… Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night. Walking aloneÂ…was it splendor, or what, we were bound with? Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair? Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground with Tapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air."

"Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life."

"He's a bootlegger....One time he killed a man who found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil."

"He's just a man names Gatsby."

"He's sensitive and I don't want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn't care about him."

"He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive."

"His [Gatsby] career as Trimalchio was over."

"His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him."

"His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed —that voice was a deathless song."

"His heart beat faster and faster as DaisyÂ’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lipsÂ’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete."

"His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was."

"His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God...and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented...Jay Gatsby...and to this conception he was faithful to the end."

"His voice, with some faint Irish melody running through it, wooed the world, yet she felt the layer of hardness in him, of self-control and of self-discipline, her own virtues. Oh, she chose him, and Nicole, lifting her head saw her choose him, heard a little sigh at the fact that he was already possessed."

"His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion."

"How good to have things like this, to be worshipped again, to pretend to have a mystery!"

"How I feel is that if I wanted anything IÂ’d take it. ThatÂ’s what IÂ’ve always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just havenÂ’t room for any other desires."

"How strange to have failed as a social creature — even criminals do not fail that way — they are the law's Loyal Opposition, so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read."

"How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his."

"Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind."

"Human sympathy has its limits."

"I always watch for the longest day in the year and then I miss it."

"His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours."

"How do you do, Captain, she said, unfastening her eyes from his with difficulty, as though they had become entangled."

"How different it all was from what you'd planned."

"I am a woman and my business is to hold things together. My business is to tear them apart."