Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.
F. Scott FitzgeraldAnd, 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 donโt care what itโs 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 reactionโGatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.
F. Scott FitzgeraldYou're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.
F. Scott FitzgeraldThe notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.
F. Scott FitzgeraldThis is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.
F. Scott FitzgeraldThe early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn't want to know said "Yes, we have no bananas," and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were--and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.
F. Scott Fitzgerald