David > David's Quotes

“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 the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others - poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner - young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I like to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The rich get richer and the poor get - children.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Do you ever want to talk away from your life?... Do you ever think this life is not exactly what you had planned? Do you ever crave something, anything that could wake you up?”
― Elizabeth Flock, Sleepwalking in Daylight

“Without them we would not know that we can rise up again after any attack, no matter how brutal. But I fear we have met an enemy too big to defeat with strength alone. We will need wisdom and cunning to survive.”
― Rebecca Kanner, Esther: A Novel

“We are strong—our enemies have kept us that way. They are the secret of our strength. We would not have to be strong if they were not always rising up from every direction,”
― Rebecca Kanner, Esther: A Novel

“The bravest thing a person can do is survive when it would seem to most that little is left. You have survived to help someone,”
― Rebecca Kanner, Esther: A Novel

“Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges