Francis Scott Fitzgerald

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing……..maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged

They were still at the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be a plane where no other human relations mattered.

The truth is that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes in.

But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it.

Tender is the night

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!’

Thomas Parke D’Invilliers

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 relations of men.

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