So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.
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 - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... And one fine morning ---
His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.
Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him. [- Nick Carroway]
I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
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, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.
You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!
he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.
The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.
He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.
Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.
or simply:
