Scott Quotes

When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

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

I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

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

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

It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.

What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.

Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

I love you like a fat kid loves cake!

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.

I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.

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

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

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!

The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "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.

They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

I love books. I like that the moment you open one and sink into it you can escape from the world, into a story that's way more interesting that yours will ever be.

I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.

Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.

Those sweet lips. My, oh my, I could kiss those lips all night long. Good things come to those who wait.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

You'll find another.' God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.

I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go

Revenge, the sweetest morsel to the mouth that ever was cooked in hell.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.

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 eternal 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.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).

You see, freedom has a way of destroying things.

The human body is the best work of art.

He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

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

All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.

It takes two to make an accident.

My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism.

Nature didn't need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.

A fit, healthy body—that is the best fashion statement

There’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave...when first we practice to deceive.

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.

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.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him

I felt like an animal, and animals don’t know sin, do they?

Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.

If you want to write a negative review, don't tickle me gently with your aesthetic displeasure about my work. Unleash the goddamn Kraken." [on Twitter, July 17, 2012]

Ethan Wyeth: I hope you're thirsty." Gideon Wyeth:"Why?" Ethan: "Cause your dumb and ugly, but I can do something about thirsty.

Things end. People leave. And you know what? Life goes on. Besides, if bad things didn't happen, how would you be able to feel the good ones?

He inclined his head at my dress. "What's the occasion?" "Homecoming," I said, twirling. "Like?" "Last I heard, Homecoming requires a date." "About that," I hedged. "I'm sort of...going with Scott. We both figure a high-school dance is the last place Hank will be patrolling." Patch smiled, but it was tight. "I take that back. If Hank wants to shoot Scott, he has my blessing.

There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.

As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. 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.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…

This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.

I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.

Don't try to win over the haters; you are not a jackass whisperer.

I don't care if I pass your test, I don't care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly - I'll beat you unfairly first. - Ender

Someday, Locke Lamora,” he said, “someday, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I’m still around to see it.” “Oh please,” said Locke. “It’ll never happen.

Think how you love me,' she whispered. 'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.' You'll always be like this to me.' Oh no; but promise me you'll remember.' Her tears were falling. 'I'll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight.

...and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires

Fine! I'll throw on some clothes. Turn around. I'm in my pj's" "I'm a guy. That's like asking a kid not to glance at the candy counter.

I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

And in the end, we were all just humans, drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.

Remember, the enemy's gate is down.

A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.

Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!

I'm a cynical idealist.

Statistically speaking, there is a 65 percent chance that the love of your life is having an affair. Be very suspicious.

New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

It's called civilization. Women invented it, and every time you men blow it all to bits, we just invent it again.

Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.

Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. You always look so cool," she repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. 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—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Most people are lucky to have even one great love in their life. You have found two.

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.

Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.

What's the whole point of being pretty on the outside when you’re so ugly on the inside?

V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.

I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.

When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.

Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.

Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same.

She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of–” I hesitated. “Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money–that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult ―once we truly understand and accept it― then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.

You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.

I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight

Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.

When she awoke, the world was on fire.

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.

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.

You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

Sometimes the facts in my head get bored and decide to take a walk in my mouth. Frequently this is a bad thing.

Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice. --The Sensible Thing

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.

It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

Last night I was seriously considering whether I was a bisexual or not but I don’t think so though I’m not sure if I’d like to be and argh I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, if you like a person, you like the person, not their genitals.

Shay sometimes talked in a mysterious way, like she was quoting the lyrics of some band no one else listened to.

There are only three people in life you can never fool--pawnbrokers, whores, and your mother. Since your mother's dead, I've taken her place. Hence, I'm bullshit-proof.

Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.

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.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I love you all. But it's time to say good-bye, for now. be careful with the world, or the next time we meet, it might get ugly. -Tally Youngblood

Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.

Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.

So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

We're not freaks, Tally. We're normal. We may not be gorgeous, but at least we're not hyped-up Barbie dolls.

When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

You know, you’re a little complicated after all.” “Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really - I’m just a - I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.

Early to bed and early to rise," Mazer intoned, "makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

So the whole war is because we can't talk to each other.

Ender Wiggin isn't a killer. He just wins—thoroughly.

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. 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.

His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.

I also remembered that you were beautiful." "Memory does play tricks on us." "No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

We all have souls of different ages

Hypocrites get offended by the truth.

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

I don't want to hurt you but I will if I have too - Tally Youngblood

Nice bird, asshole!

I don't have to beat you. I don't have to beat you, motherfucker. I just have to keep you here... until Jean shows up.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

I cut off his fingers to get him to talk, and when he'd confessed everything I wanted to hear, I had his fucking tongue cut out, and the stump cauterized." Everyone in the room stared at him. "I called him an asshole, too," said Locke. "He didn't like that.

You're a monster. Thanks. Does this mean I get a raise? No, just a medal. The budget isn't inexhaustable.

A boy may be as disagreeable as he pleases, but when a girl refuses to crap sunshine on command, the world mutters darkly about her moods.

I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do — to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like.

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.

It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?

Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.

That’s sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real.” Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. “Real love, real friends, real body parts…

I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.

The best you can hope for in a relationship is to find someone whose flaws are the sort you don’t mind. It is futile to look for someone who has no flaws, or someone who is capable of significant change; that sort of person exists only in our imaginations.

You're insane!" she shouted. "Pretty cool, huh?" "No!"Tally yelled. "Why didn't you tell me it was broken?" Shay shrugged. "More fun that way?" "More fun?" Her heart beating fast,her vision strangely clear. She was full of anger and relief and...joy. "Well, kind of. But you suck!

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction

I didn't want it to be one good memory that led to a lot of bad ones. I wanted it to stay what it was, one amazing moment, something that was strong and sweet enough to stand on its own. Something I could remember without any pain. - Kate

For what it’s worth... it’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.

Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

... It's perfect! Locke would appreciate it." "Bug," Calo said, "Locke is our brother and our love for him knows no bounds. But the four most fatal words in the Therin language are 'Locke would appreciate it.'" "Rivalled only by 'Locke taught me a new trick,'" added Galo. "The only person who gets away with Locke Lamora games ..." "... is Locke ..." "... because we think the gods are saving him up for a really big death. Something with knives and hot irons ..." "... and fifty thousand cheering spectators.

You're thinking I'm one of those wise-ass California vegetarians who is going to tell you that eating a few strips of bacon is bad for your health. I'm not. I say its a free country and you should be able to kill yourself at any rate you choose, as long as your cold dead body is not blocking my driveway.

She was beautiful, but not like those girls in magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.

I only steal because my dear old family needs the money to live!" Locke Lamora made this proclamation with his wine glass held high; he and the other Gentleman Bastards were seated at the old witchwood table. . . . The others began to jeer. "Liar!" they chorused "I only steal because this wicked world won't let me work an honest trade!" Calo cried, hoisting his own glass. "LIAR!" "I only steal," said Jean, "because I've temporarily fallen in with bad company." "LIAR!" At last the ritual came to Bug; the boy raised his glass a bit shakily and yelled, "I only steal because it's heaps of fucking fun!" "BASTARD!

If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns at the end of your dock." Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to him, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted things had diminished by one.

Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.