F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

"Breathing dreams like air"

"Let us learn how to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead' he suggested, 'After that my own rule is to let everything alone'."

"They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together."

"Human sympathy has its limits."

"I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife."

"He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden."

"Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home."

"By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish."

"So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home."

"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."

"A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired."

"I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes."

"Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window."

"I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

"I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library."

"Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."

"I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

"Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. You always look so cool," she repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw."

"I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity."