I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.

Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.

I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor

Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.

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