Quotes to inspire and reflect

If those arrangements [the fundamental arrangements of knowledge] were to disappear as they appeared . . . then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

Le bon Dieu est dans le détail .

Listen, little Elia: draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.

I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.

The wise and tragic sense of life. By this I mean . . . the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not “happiness and pleasure” but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

When I was your age I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream divided one day when I decided to marry your mother after all. . . . I was a man divided—she wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream. She realized too late that work was dignity, and the only dignity, and tried to atone for it by working herself, but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever.

It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: “She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven.”

The hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—

In the spring of ’27, something bright and alien flashed across the sky. A young Minnesotan [Charles Lindbergh] who seemed to have had nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of their old best dreams.

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”

That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name.

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

[ Remark by attendee at Gatsby’s funeral :] The poor son-of-a-bitch.

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon . . . and the day after that, and the next thirty years?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

This is to tell you about a young man named Ernest Hemingway, who lives in Paris (an American), writes for the Transatlantic Review and has a brilliant future. . . . I’d look him up right away. He’s the real thing.

The victor belongs to the spoils.

I like to keep a bottle of stimulant handy in case

I’ve been drunk only once in my life. But that lasted for twenty-three years.

[ Deathbed remark while reading the Bible :] I’m looking for loopholes.

[ Of Charlie Chaplin :] The son of a bitch is a ballet dancer. . . . He’s the best ballet dancer that ever lived . . . and if I get a good chance I’ll kill him with my bare hands.

[ Cuthbert J. Twillie, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] A thing worth having is worth cheating for.

[ The Great Man, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] I was in love with a beautiful blonde once. She drove me to drink. ’Tis the one thing I’m indebted to her for.

[ When asked whether he liked children :] I do if they’re properly cooked!

[ Cuthbert J. Twillie, played by W. C. Fields, responding to the question, “Is this a game of chance?” :] Not the way I play it.