The Great Gatsby

One moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five years of unwavering devotion.

They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl.
She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ’All right,’ I said, ’I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning...
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.

I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me.

It takes two to make an accident.

What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was "You can't live forever; you can't live forever".

Human sympathy has its limits.

His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps, and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home, three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by.

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

A sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

There was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.