Great Throughts Treasury

"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."

"I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth..."

"I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon - down here, in Italy, everybody thinks he's Christ"

"I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside."

"I like temperamental men.' 'There aren't any. Men don't know how to be really angry or really happy-- and the ones that do, go to pieces."

"I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick any romantic woman in the crowd and imagine that in five minutes, I come into your life, and you never know anyone and no one would disapprove."

"I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says IÂ’m his ideal."

"I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. 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."

"I love her and thatÂ’s the beginning and end of everything."

"I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands."

"I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry."

"I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to 'succeed'-and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills-domestic, professional and personal-then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last."

"I like large parties. TheyÂ’re so intimate. At small parties there isnÂ’t any privacy."

"I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to someone. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth."

"I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes-there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings."

"I read somewhere that the sun's getting hotter every year, said Tom genially. It seems that pretty soon the earth's going to fall into the sun--or wait a minute--it's just the opposite--the sun's getting colder every year."

"I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life."

"I see you're looking at my cuff buttons. I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now."

"I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world."

"I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation - with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game."

"I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone."

"I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway"

"I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife."

"I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - people didn't get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity."

"I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes."

"I think one thing today and another tomorrow. That is really all that's the matter with me, except a crazy defiance and a lack of proportion."

"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."

"I think they're very attractive,' Abe agreed. 'I just don't think they're attractive, that's all."

"I thought I knew her, because she knew things she did not know."

"I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and 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."

"I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood."

"I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before — and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well."

"I understand and I'm happier than life ever meant me to be."

"I want it to smell of magnolias instead of peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on the same gravel that Lee's boots crunched on. There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--"

"I want leisure to read—an immense amount."

"I want to be a society vampire, you see."

"I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally."

"I want to do everything in the world with you."

"I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where thereÂ’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see."

"I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale."

"I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe - and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me."

"I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me."

"I want to live my life so that my nights are full of regrets."

"I want to live where things happen on a big scale."

"I want to tell you about your heart— you've probably been neglecting your heart—and you don’t know."

"I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life."

"I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish."

"I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart."

"I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. 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. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

"I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie."