- “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” (p. 1)
- 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. (p. 1)
- If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. (p. 1)
- I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands. (p. 20)
- No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. (p. 38)
- It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment. (p. 41)
- 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. (p. 72)