She felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible.
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit.
Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
... and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.”
— If it wasn't for the mist, we could see the green light.
— What green light?
— The one that burns all night at the end of your dock.
Possibly...it had occurred to Gatsby that the colossal significance of that light had vanished forever.
A caravanserai...of billionaire playboy publishers and their blond nurses. Heiresses comparing inheritances on Gatsby's beach. My boss, Walter Chase, losing money at the roulette tables. Gossip columnists alongside... gangsters and governors exchanging telephone numbers. Film stars... Broadway directors... morality protectors...high school defectors.