Quotes – Page 234 | Just Great DataBase

I remembered the old doctor, – “It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot.” I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.

He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is. and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that accumulate in every man’s life,—a vague impress on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage. . .

I don’t seem able to get it straight in my mind….

Let’s hang ourselves immediately!

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.

The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the unclear voices of children, already gathered like crikets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight.

The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word ARREST. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them-with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances, which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.

You could get a book then. There was a book in the library about Holland. There were lovely foreign names in it and pictures of strangelooking cities and ships. It made you feel so happy.

At first I was surprised and confused; then as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or speak hour upon hour it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested–interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end.

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

Puts a weight on ya. Goin’ out lookin’ for somepin you know you ain’t gonna find.

She had caught a cold and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.

I wish my auntie was here.””I wish my father.. O, what’s the use?

Stuff it into you, his belly counselled him.

Papa says if you don’t watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, before any words came through.

I came to see you two-” Words could not express the dull pain of these things.