He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.

And Yale is November, crisp and energetic.

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.

sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy

Fairies: Nature's attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them.

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.