No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.

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.

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.