There Are No Second Acts

...for A Moment People Set Down Their Glasses In County Clubs And Speak-easies And Thought Of Their Old Best Dreams.

Then A Strange Thing Happened. She Turned To Him And Smiled, And As He Saw Her Smile Every Rag Of Anger And Hurt Vanity Dropped From Him — As Though His Very Moods Were But The Outer Ripples Of Her Own, As Though Emotion Rose No Longer In His Breast Unless She Saw Fit To Pull An Omnipotent Controlling Thread.

And, After Boasting This Way Of My Tolerance, I Come To The Admission That It Has A Limit. Conduct May Be Founded On The Hard Rock Or The Wet Marshes, But After A Certain Point I Don’t Care What It’s Founded On. When I Came Back From The East Last Autumn I Felt That I Wanted The World To Be In Uniform And At A Sort Of Moral Attention Forever; I Wanted No More Riotous Excursions With Privileged Glimpses Into The Human Heart. Only Gatsby, The Man Who Gives His Name To This Book, Was Exempt From My Reaction—gatsby, Who Represented Everything For Which I Have An Unaffected Scorn.

Family Quarrels Are Bitter Things. They Don't Go According To Any Rules. They're Not Like Aches Or Wounds, They're More Like Splits In The Skin That Won't Heal Because There's Not Enough Material.

Draw Your Chair Up Close To The Edge Of The Precipice And I’ll Tell You A Story.