I learned a little of beauty – enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth – and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition...

Aristocracy’s only an admission that certain traits which we call fine – courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing – can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don’t...

Babamın bilgiççe söylediği ve benim de bilgiççe onayladığım şu sözünü unutmaktan halen korku duyarım: bazı temel incelikler dünyaya adaletsiz dağıtılmıştır.

My God,’ he gasped, ‘you’re fun to kiss.

The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness – the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.

I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

Isn’t Hollywood a dump — in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

Most of the big shore places were closed now. And there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of the ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses...

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

The fire blazing in her dark and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame.

He found that the business of optimism was no mean task.

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn … No — Gatsby turned out all...

They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as...

Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man’s world–they preserved their individuality through men...

Astenersi dal giudicare implica un’infinita speranza.

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.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life–not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.

But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain…

I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

You’ve got an awfully kissable mouth.

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.

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

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured...

Doğum yapalı bir saat bile olmamıştı. Tom’un nerede olduğunu Tanrı bilir. Narkozdan çıkınca yoğun bir terkedilmişlik hissi içimi kapladı ve hastabakıcıya kız mı oğlan mı diye sordum. Kız olduğunu öğrenince de, arkamı döndüm ve ağladım...

Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know–because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in...

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten...

Tokią šypseną, skleidžiančią neišsenkamą pasitikėjimą, padrąsinimą, pamatai tik kekius keturis penkis kartus gyvenime. Akimirką ji tarsi aprėpia visą išorinį pasaulį, paskui, negalėdama atsispirti jūsų žavesiui, grįžta ir susitelkia prie jūsų. Ir jaučiate, kad jus supranta...

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful...

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held...

I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she...

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.

Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an...

Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are,...

Durante il fragoroso decollo Dick si sentì intorpidito, rendendosi conto di quanto fosse stanco. Un’enorme persuasiva tranquillità s’impossessò di lui, e lasciò la malattia ai malati, il rumore ai motori, la direzione ai piloti.

He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.

Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from...

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.

My courage is faith–faith in the eternal resilience of me–that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I’ve got to keep my lips shut and my chin high...

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don’t like this kiss-and-forget.”But I don’t want to argue. I think it’s wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can’t it’ll...

I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.

Deep in his heart, he wondered if he was after all worse than this man or the next. He knew that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the...