Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby [is] my imaginary eldest brother.

Optimism is the content of small men in high places.

my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.

I've got an adjective that just fits you.

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and roared-really all the banalities about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.