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Når du føler trang til å kritisere noen, sa han, skal du huske at alle mennesker i denne verden, ikke har nytt godt av de fordeler du har hatt.

Men i hans hjerte raste en ustanselig hvirvelstorm. De mest groteske og fantastiske forestillinger hjemsøkte ham om natten. En verden av skrikende farver levde i hans tanker mens klokken tikket på vaskeservanten, og månen vætet klærne hans som lå i en haug på gulvet, med fuktig lys. Hver natt føyde han nye detaljer til sine fantasibilder, helt til søvnen kom og utslettet den siste strålende scenen. En stund tilfredsstillet disse fantasiforestillingene ham. De ga ham en viss ide om virkelighetens uvirkelighet, en garanti for at verdens grunnvoll hvilte sikkert på vingen til en fe.

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

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 for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

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 her, 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 objects had diminished by one.

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

I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. 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.

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.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

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