Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they’ve hit a sentence or two in a ‘dangerous book’ that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did...

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.

A love affair is like a short story–it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and...

I mean the women who, without any of the prerogatives of youth and beauty, demand continual slavery from their men….They sit back complacently and watch their husbands slave for them; and, without furnishing any of...

The present was the thing–work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a...

Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed...

…and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else’s clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

When I see a beautiful shell like that I can’t help feeling a regret about what’s inside it.

Courage is a sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.

I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy — why I had become identified with...

Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it–later in life he almost completely slew it–but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys… unscrupulousness… the...

I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because...

He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed...

but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful...

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...