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

“Want any of this stuff? Jordan?... Nick?"I didn't answer.Nick?" he asked again.What?"Want any?"No... I just remembered that today's my birthday."I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.”

“Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”

“It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.”

“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 ---”

“I don't give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me and I felt a little dizzy for a while.”

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor”