"I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won't."

"I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth..."

"Courage is a sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things."

"Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life."

"Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness."

"A man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave."

"Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material."

"Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind."

"When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it."

"The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world."

"Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken..."

"Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night."

"Whenever you feel like criticzing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven t had the advantages that you've had."

"Character is plot, plot is character."

"I wish I had done everything on earth with you."

"Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, 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, 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."

"New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world."

"Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world's weight he had never chosen to bear."

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

"Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again."

"I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything."

"I became bored - that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts."

"The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun."