“And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.”

“I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”

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

“i could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream.”

“I was the world in which I walked, and what I sawOr heard or felt came not but from myself;And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”

“They never found out who did it, and I never came forward. There was, after all, no evidence. I had committed my first perfect crime. My mother used to hope that I would rise up from my humble roots. Become someone successful, or even famous.I’m famous all right, but I don’t think it’s what she had in mind.”