“The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.”

“Life opened up in one if its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: 'Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.' On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.”

“Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.”

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different. ”

“What a wonderful song, she thought-everything was wonderful tonight, most of all this romantic scene in the den with their hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm limousines and in low cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering trees-only the boy might change, and this one was so nice.”

“After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby's party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world.”

“The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.”