“And she wanted for a moment to hold him and devour him, wanted his mouth, his ears, his coat collar, wanted to surround him and engulf him.”
“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”
“I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.”
“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me you’d better go.”
“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”
“Because desire just cheats you. It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone—”
“Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafés in Mont Marte, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure.”
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
“That is part of the beauty of literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from everyone. You Belong.”
“I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
It’s about the right time of year to read (or re-read) Gatsby. Why not go check it out? We have at least 153 copies throughout the boroughs…
(via nypl)
