F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
46 quotes
"The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun."
"Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.You always look so cool," she repeated.She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw."
"Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures."
"I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes."
"A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired."
"So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home."
"By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish."
"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."
"He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden."
"I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife."
"They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together."
"Let us learn how to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead' he suggested, 'After that my own rule is to let everything alone'."
"Breathing dreams like air"
"It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air."
"A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea."
"but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering."
"My own rule is to let everything alone."
"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."
"The tears coursed down her cheeks- not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets."
"They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together."
"I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."
"I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't change the past.''Can't change the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!"
"I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't change the past.""Can't change the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
"He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand."
"I was alone again in the unquiet darkness."