’Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?’ |
[Gatsby] stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast...and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever. |
[Gatsby] wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. 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. |
A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big. |
After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eye’s power of correction. |
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath. |
Always willing to lend a helping hand to the one above him. |
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards. |
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. |
Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can! |
Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor |
Either you think or else others have to think for you and take power from you. |
Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness. |
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past |
Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. |