in the belly of the fish

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Charms in The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 180 pages

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

"It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life."

"I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

"Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply."

"But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires."

"Every one 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."

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

"Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry."

"There must have been moments event hat afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion."

"One thing's sure and nothing's surer / The rich get richer and the poor get-/ Children"

"It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment."

"The lawn and drive has been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption – and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them goodbye."

"She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand."

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

"If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream."

"They were careless people – Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."