Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable vision to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.

His imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby . . . sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.

I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened , the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people.

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 like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

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.