Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that.

The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.

Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.

The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.

So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.

Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.

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