Nick Carraway

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.

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.

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

This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

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

... and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.”

Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.

She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.