'something commensurate to his capacity for wonder'

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

'a high price for living too long with a single dream'

No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock—until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. 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 . . .

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

'planning to be such an important finger'

"Well," Amory considered, "I'm not sure that the war itself had any great effect on you or me—but it certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation."

Tom looked up in surprise.

"Yes it did," insisted Amory. "I'm not sure it didn't kill it out of the whole world. Oh Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader—and now even a Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn't be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger—"

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)

'the broad path of honesty'

They spent two evenings getting an exact definition. The slicker was good-looking or clean-looking; he had brains, social brains that is, and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to get ahead, be popular, admired and never in trouble. He dressed well, was particularly neat in appearance and derived his name from the fact that his hair was inevitably worn short, soaked in water or tonic, parted in the middle and slicked back as the current fashion dictated.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)