"Gatsby? ...What Gatsby?"

"'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'" 

"In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores."

"Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope."

"I come to the admission that it hads a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it is founded on."

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

"it was an extra-ordinary 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."

"(I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her' an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)"

"'Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?'"

"'Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it.'"

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

"...but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can."

"She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye."

"'Neither of them can stand the person they're married to.'"

"'What I say is, why go on living with them if they can't stand them? If I was them I'd get a divorce and get married to each other right away.'"

"'I couldn't keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head.'"

"'All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.'""

"introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names."

"I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited."

"It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced-or seemed to face- the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."

"'Who is he?'"

..."'He's just a man named Gatsby.'"

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

"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams- not through her own fault, but beause of the colossal vitality of his illusion."

"No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."

"the voice was a deathless song."

"Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together."

"A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor."

"he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled."

"...when I had reached the point of believing everything and nothing about him."

"I was startled, naturally, but the really surprising thing was that it hadn't happened before."

"It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment."

"Daisy and Gatsby danced."

"'Go ahead... and if you want to take down any addresses here's my little gold pencil."

"except for the half-hour she'd been alone with Gatsby she wasn't having a good time."

"She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand."

"'That girl hadn't been invited. They simply force their way in and he's too polite to object."

"After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby's party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside?"

 "What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours? Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marveled at some authentically radiant young girl who with on fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five years of unwavering devotion."

"He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: 'I never loved you.'"

"just as if it were five years ago."

"'She used to be able to understand.'"

"'I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't repeat the past.'

'Cant repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!'

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

'I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before, ' he said, nodding determinedly. 'She'll see.'

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself pershaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that one thing was..."

"He knew that when he kissed this girl, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer o the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete."