The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald On New York

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• I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines give to the restless eye.

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

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Fitzgerald On Parties

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• I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy.

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• It’s an advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see.

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• I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day - people who do intriguing things. Celebrated people.

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Fitzgerald On People

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• Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, remember that some people haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

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• Why go on living with someone if you can’t stand them?

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• Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

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• There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

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• No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

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• There is no difference between men so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

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• There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.

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• Human sympathy has its limits.

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• Tom and Daisy were careless people - they smashed up things. They then retreated into their money - or whatever it was, that kept them together and let other people clean up their mess.

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• Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.