Quotes from work

The Great Gatsby

“So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.”

“What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining."
I’m glad Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.”

“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”

“It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.”

“The rich get richer and the poor get - children.”

“He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.”

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead," he suggested. "After that my own rule is to let everything alone.”

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

“Have a drink Tom and then you won't feel so foolish to yourself.”

“If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”

“What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

“I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”

“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.”

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

“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.”

“They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made….”

“He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.”

“I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”