Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.
If you're in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.
His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should....
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 her into hims...
The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.
It takes two to make an accident.
It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into...
In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.
Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.''How pleasant then to be insane!
Grow up and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
One should ... be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
That's the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.
Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality - he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at a...
Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ru...
They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other h...
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, beyo...