The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl.
She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ’All right,’ I said, ’I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps, and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home, three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by.

She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her.

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.

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 wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.

It was all very careless and confused.
They were careless peoples, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…

My cousin began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice.
It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered
“Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air.

A sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me.

There was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.