The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.

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.

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

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.

It was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved--so easy to be loved--so hard to love.

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

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.