I’m not sentimental–I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,is that the sentimental person thinks things will last–the romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won’t.

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.

Writers aren’t exactly people…. They’re a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.

There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.

We’ll all be failures?””Yes. I don’t mean only money failures, but just sort of – of ineffectual and sad, and – oh, how can I tell you?

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

This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.It is somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.

I just think of people,” she continued, “whether they seem right where they are and fit into a picture. I don’t mind if they don’t do anything. I don’t see why they should; in fact...

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man , more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. ‘How do you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helplessly....

It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.

my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

It’s all life is. Just going ’round kissing people.

Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.

I’ve always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy — one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have...

One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great burden of glory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with Amory and Eleanor, dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal beauty and curious elfin...

I went in – after making every possible noise in the kitchen, short of pushing over the stove – but I don’t believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the...

Always, after he was in bed, there were voices – indefinite, fading, enchanting – just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorites waking dreams.

Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty.

The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

C’mon, Amory. Your romance is overYou don’t know how true you spoke. No idea. ‘At’s the whole trouble

By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.

Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.

What are you going to do? “Can’t say – run for president, write -” “Greenwich Village?” “Good heavens, no – I said write – not drink.

The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance – that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it – then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance,...

And in the end, we were all just humans.. drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.

Understand now, I’m purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all...

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

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

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

What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must...

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

They always believe that ‘things are in a bad way now,’ but they ‘haven’t any faith in these idealists.’ One minute they call Wilson ‘just a dreamer, not practical’- a year later they rail at...

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her,...

Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun...

Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?” –

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things...

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been...

Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there’s sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-

I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That’s what’s called ingenuousness.

Rather nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.

One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil

Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.