“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

“Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive.”

“When Eleanor's arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her-- she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes.”

“Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.”

“All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else's clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.”

“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.”

“Who is he anyhow, an actor?""No.""A dentist?""...No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added cooly: "He's the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919.""Fixed the World Series?" I repeated.The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people--with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe."How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute."He just saw the opportunity.""Why isn't he in jail?""They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man.”