Quotes from work

The Great Gatsby

“We haven’t met for many years, said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be.
"Five years next November."
The automatic quality set us all back at least another minute.”

“He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”

“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

“A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.”

“the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.”

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

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

“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to makes such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person I thought it was your secret pride."

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."

She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”

“Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

“So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing.”

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

“The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.”

“one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty−one that everything afterward savors of anti−climax.”

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”

“I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.”

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

“Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”