The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.

It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

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

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 to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

‘Good night.’ He smiled—and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired it all the time. ‘Good night, old sport…. Good night.’

‘You’re a rotten driver,’ I protested. ‘Either you ought to be more careful or you oughtn’t to drive at all.’ ‘I am careful.’ ‘No, you’re not.’ ‘Well, other people are,’ she said lightly. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ ‘They’ll keep out of my way,’ she insisted. ‘It takes two to make an accident.’ ‘Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.’ ‘I hope I never will,’ she answered. ‘I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.’

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.

door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.