“He found that the business of optimism was no mean task.”

“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.”

“Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.”

“One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil”

“he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”

“I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.My business is to tear them apart.”

“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?”