If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

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.

They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.