They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.

She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.

Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains.

One hurries through, even though there's time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.

The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.

Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.