What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

Have a drink Tom and then you won't feel so foolish to yourself.

I have lived hard and ruined the essential innocence [sic] in myself that could make it that possible [sic], and the fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps but not renunciation.

Want any of this stuff? Jordan?... Nick?" I didn't answer. Nick?" he asked again. What?" Want any?" No... I just remembered that today's my birthday." I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.

The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.