I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.
“
| — | The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald |
He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost a part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.
“
| — | F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (via fuckyeahfitzgerald) |
The house “Lands End” that may have been the inspiration for The Great Gatsby’s luxurious West/East Egg homes has been torn down to make way for development for five new houses.
“The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens.”
The might-have-been West Egg, a 20-acre estate atop cliffs in Kings Point, with panoramic views stretching from Manhattan all the way to City Island and Connecticut.
He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. 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. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.
“
| — | F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (via liquidnight) |
He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. 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. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
“
| — | The Great Gatsby. (via Prettythingsimnot) (via quote-book) |
