Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.

Gatsby Believed in the green light, the orgiastic 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.

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.

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.

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 such a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die.  First of all, that one second isn't a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time...  For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching falling stars...  And yellow leaves, from the maple trees, that lined my street...  Or my grandmother's hands, and the way her skin seemed like paper...  And the first time I saw my cousin Tony's brand new Firebird...  And Janie...  And Janie...  And...  Carolyn.  I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me...  but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world.  Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst...  And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life...  You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure.  But don't worry...  you will someday.

It was one of those days when it's a minute away from snowing and there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it.  And this bag was, like, dancing with me.  Like a little kid begging me to play with it.  For fifteen minutes.  And that's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and...  this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever.  Video's a poor excuse, I know.  But it helps me remember...  and I need to remember...  Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in. 

I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.  Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me.  And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.  That's all I'd do all day.  I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.  I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.  I know it's crazy.

...down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished or afraid.  The detective...  must be such a man.  He is the hero; he is everything.  He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.  He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour...  by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it...  He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all.  He is a common man or he could not go among common men.  He has a sense of character or he would not know his job.  He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and passionate revenge.  He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.  He talks as the man of his age talks...  that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, disgust for shame, and contempt for pettiness.

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams.  They trespassed upon my thoughts.  They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.  Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend.  I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.  I dare say I was not very well at that time.

Neither blindness nor ignorance corrupts people and governments.  They soon realise where the path they have taken is leading them.  But there is an impulse within them, favoured by their natures and reinforced by their habits, which they do not resist; it continues to propel them forward...  He who overcomes himself is divine.  Most see their ruin before their eyes; but they go on into it.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!