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.”

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

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.

“Wha’s matter?” he inquired calmly. “Did we run outa gas?” “Look!” Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel—he stared at it for a moment, and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky. “It came off,” some one explained. He nodded. “At first I din’ notice we’d stopped.” A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a determined voice: “Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?” At least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was, explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical bond. “Back out,” he suggested after a moment. “Put her in reverse.” “But the wheel’s off!” He hesitated. “No harm in trying,” he said.

funny line, use it like a story

He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before.

if someoned is lying, he will talk fast or look other way.

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before—and 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.