Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby")
Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby")
We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby")
What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours? (F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby")
When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby")
Wilson's glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small gray clouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby")
Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby")
You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby")
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I'll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Gatsby stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast...and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)