the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice-box with the left overs.
F. Scott FitzgeraldHe had no plans, no definite intentions, except to kiss her lips again, to hold her in his arms.
F. Scott FitzgeraldFirst, 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.
F. Scott Fitzgeraldthe growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humour. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third โ before long the best lines cancel out โ and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true
F. Scott FitzgeraldThe truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of Godโa phrase which, if it means anything, means just thatโand he must be about His Fatherโs Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.
F. Scott Fitzgerald