[ Remark by attendee at Gatsby’s funeral :] The poor son-of-a-bitch.

[A]t three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

[The Jazz Age] was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dues and the casualness of chorus girls.

“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”

“I’m glad I’m American,” she said. "Here in Italy 1 feel that everybody’s dead. Carthaginians and old Romans and Moorish pirates and medieval princes with poisoned rings.

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”

👁️ 1

“Well, I guess the children have left for school by this time—I might as well go home.”

1 just couldn't make the grade as a hack—that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

A lot of young girls together is a romantic secret thing like the first sight of wild ducks at dawn.

A sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.