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"Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men."
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"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."
Author Name
Personal Development
"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then."
Author Name
Personal Development
"She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
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"I suppose that there's a caddish streak in every man that runs crosswise across his character and disposition and general outlook."
Personality
"The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter."
Opinion
"For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming."
Poetry
"An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards."
Relationship
"Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again."
Politics
"No decent career was ever founded on a public."
Career
"It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before."
People
"Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction."
Money
"Most of the big shore places were closed now. And there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of the ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away till gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes, A fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. For a transitory, enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent. Face to face, for the last time in history, with something commensurate to its capacity for wonder."
Reflection
"When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up."
People
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