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life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
but no one swooned backward on Gatsby and no French bob touched Gatsby’s shoulder and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby’s head for one link.
Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply
But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires,
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.
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
somnambulatory
gonnegtion.
It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.
A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: ‘There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.’
Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.
It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.
It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
caravansary
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.
And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand.
‘God sees everything,’ repeated Wilson. ‘That’s an advertisement,’ Michaelis assured him.
pasquinade
The door that I pushed open on the advice of an elevator boy was marked ‘The Swastika Holding Company’ and at first there didn’t seem to be any one inside. But when I’d shouted ‘Hello’ several times in vain an argument broke out behind a partition and presently a lovely Jewess appeared at an interior door and scrutinized me with black hostile eyes.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
