I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handle with gloves.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.

Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

A man's social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich.