The Great Gatsby

I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

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

I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air.

If one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked.
“It’s full of -” I hesitated.
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it… High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl… .

The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something—most affectations conceal something eventually.

The instant her voice broke off ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said.
It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me.

I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.

For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

She felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit.

At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

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

Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.