"I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me."

"...he told me all the things he liked to THINK he thought in the misty past."

"All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream."

"I was alone again in the unquiet darkness."

"Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person."

"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."

"Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint."

"Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten remoteness of the afternoon."

"New friends can often have a better time together than old friends."

"Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction."

"Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness."

"Their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity."

"America is a willingness of the heart."

"Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against."

"Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind."

"No decent career was ever founded on a public."

"Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar."

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

"Deep in his heart, he wondered if he was after all worse than this man or the next. He knew that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the result of circumstances and environment; that often when he raged at himself as an egotist something would whisper ingratiatingly: "No. Genius!"

"I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds....it is an absolute fact---so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life."

"No girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it's every girl for herself."

"Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization."

"If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence."

"I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside."

"I just think of people," she continued, "whether they seem right where they are and fit into a picture. I don't mind if they don't do anything. I don't see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when people do anything."

"Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on - I've seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have been hung - glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them."

"A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea."

"Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window."

"After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad."

"It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man , more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. 'How do you get to West Egg village?' he asked helplessly. I told him. Ans as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He has casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood."

"A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life."

"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."

"Always, after he was in bed, there were voices - indefinite, fading, enchanting - just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorites waking dreams."

"He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls."

"She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end."

"Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want."

"One o' clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping sentences of an enraptured man. Four o'clock: her little feet moving to melody, her face distinct in the crowd, her partner happy as a petted puppy and mad as the immemorial hatter."

"Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle."

"Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders."

"Communism as I see it has no place in the United States, and the American people will not stand for its teachings."

"Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain."

"But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain..."

"So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home."

"One should ... be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."

"I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

"Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery."

"The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion."

"To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing."

"I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."

"My own rule is to let everything alone."