All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before.

She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven.

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.

To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their (W/E Egg) dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down.

you once liked me, didn't you?, he asked. LIKED you- I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking.