"This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea--if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset."

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

"The sea, he thought, had treasured it's memories deeper than the faithless land."

"You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility."

"It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well."

"My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness."

"Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness."

"The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain."

"I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything."

"Take off that darn fur coat!...Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows."

"I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can."

"Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.You always look so cool," she repeated.She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw."

"This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.It is somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life."

"Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind."

"They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered."

"What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe - why, intelligence never built a steam-engine! Circumstances built a steam-engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances."

"Breathing dreams like air."

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath."

"The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it."

"Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality - he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor."

"The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older-intelligence and good manners."

"Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so."

"No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly 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 ... No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men."

"An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional."

"This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene."

"Forgotten is forgiven."

"He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret."

"Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon."

"Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero."

"Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren't just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children."

"As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone."

"It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being."

"She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well."

"By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish."

"There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes... He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrap-book of his life."

"If you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them."

"The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly."

"No matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And then one fine morning-So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

"The movies remind me of the Triangle Club at Princeton. I used to belong to it, and we always started out firm in our decision to create new and startling things. We always ended up by producing the same old show. In the beginning, our enthusiasm and ideals discarded as rubbish all the old fossilized plots."

"I found something! Courage--just that, courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always."

"C'mon, Amory. Your romance is overYou don't know how true you spoke. No idea. 'At's the whole trouble."

"It was a curious day, slashed abruptly with fleeting, familiar impressions."

"I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife."

"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."

"Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity."

"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

"A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big."

"This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, "a constant striving" (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it) only adds to this unhappiness in the end--that end that comes to our youth and hope."

"Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art."