#gatsby

Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#fitzgerald #gatsby #lies #love #moonlight

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#prose #the-great-gatsby #love

I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#flapper #flirting #gatsby #kiss #kissing

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#men

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven-a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#men

If this were a fairy tale, this would be the part where the fishboy appears and Diana shoots him through the heart. Because he is a tragic hero, he's our fucking Gatsby, and he lived for his fish and he has to die for his fish. He would never let my fake authority, condoning his abandonment, making up rules about what's okay just to save his life, convince him to give up his family. He would never leave. He would know that without him, none of us will be as good. Me, without a friend; and the fish, without a brother; and the island, without a story; and Diana, without her something real, we will all be a little bit less than we were before we knew him. So he wouldn't leave. Not until I could come with him. And I have never been less able to leave than I am now. But this isn't a fairy tale, and he doesn't appear. We stand here for a long time. He really left. Because it was all that we could do. ↗

— Hannah Moskowitz

#gatsby #family

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. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#life

He smiled understandingly-much more than understanding. 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. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#life

This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and riding smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#men

Hating "The Great Gatsby" (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#twitter #twitter