F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?”

“When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her.”

“It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man , more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. 'How do you get to West Egg village?' he asked helplessly. I told him. Ans as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He has casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.”

“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.”

“Apoi o saruta.La atingerea buzelor lui,Daisy se deschise ca o floare,iar intruchiparea se desavarsi.”

“Astfel alunecam spre moarte,prin amurgul din care caldura zilei pierea treptat.”

“The rich get richer and the poor get - children.”

“I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘all right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

“The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.”

“It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.”

“I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, 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.”

“People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.”

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

“I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.”

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

“A man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.”

“their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.”

“Piensa en cuánto me quieres - había susurrado-. No te voy a pedir que me quieras siempre como ahora, pero sí te pido que lo recuerdes. Pase lo que pase, siempre quedará en mí algo de lo que soy esta noche”

“My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.”

“These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire—I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.”

“You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”

“Summer has no day,' she said. 'We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...it has no day.”

“already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.”

“She walked rather quickly; she liked to be active, though at times she gave an impression of repose that was at once static and evocative. This was because she knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent, contributing just her share of urbane humor with a precision that approached meagreness. But at the moment when strangers tended to grow uncomfortable in the presence of this economy she would seize the topic and rush off with it, feverishly surprised with herself-- then bring it back and relinquish it abruptly, almost timidly, like an obedient retriever, having been adequate and something more.”

“People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.”

“Look here, old sport," he broke out surprisingly. "What's your opinion of me, anyhow?" A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.”

“I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport.I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she didn't, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?”

“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”

“All I think of ever is that I love you.”

“It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.”

“I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.”

“Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.”

“So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate road-house next door.”

“A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.”

“You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them--always thinking people are so important--especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it--on the inside.”

“Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid.”

“Afterwards, he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.”

“Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened slightly with the ghost of a superior ‘Hm!’.”

“Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

“one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.”

“It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

“She had achieved the elusiveness that gives hidden significance to the least significant remarks.“Is it like you felt toward me in Paris?”“I feel comfortable and happy when I’m with you. In Paris it was different. But you never know how you once felt. Do you?”

“Oh, such a shame, such a shame. Oh, such a shame. What’s it all about anyhow?”“I’ve wondered for a long time.”“But why bring it to me?”“I guess I’m the Black Death,” he said slowly. “I don’t seem to bring people happiness any more.”

“I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.”

“Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.”

“Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names — Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.”

“She wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe forever.”

“I slunkoff in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place inthe garden where a single man could linger without lookingpurposeless and alone.”

“We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.”

“Out of the deep sophistication of Anthony an understanding formed, nothing atavistic or obscure, indeed scarcely physical at all, an understanding remembered from the romancings of many generations of minds that as she talked and caught his eyes and turned her lovely head, she moved him as he had never been moved before. The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance- that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it- then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.”