- Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.
- If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
- And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
- “You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “I know somebody there.” “I don’t know a single —” “You must know Gatsby.” “Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”
- I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
- Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
- The modesty of the demand shook me. 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.
- 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.”
- No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
- For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.
- “They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
feb 3 2019 ∞
apr 11 2024 +