I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.
I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.
Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.
The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.
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.
At this point Jordan and I tried to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we remain - as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions.
His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him
She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.
The words seemed to bite physically into 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.
Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names - Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.
His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed -that voice was a deathless song.
If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.
She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.
Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.
Can't repeat the past?…Why of course you can!
Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.
I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful fool
She wouldn't let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up in a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.
Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.
Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!
I am one of the few honest people I have ever known.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.
I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy--it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.
So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing.
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.
It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people- with the single mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.
So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate road-house next door.
They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
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 rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!
I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
It takes two to make an accident.
So we beat on, boats agains the current. Borne back ceaselessly into the past.
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.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories