In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." (page 1)
"At the enchanted metrolpolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others-- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner-- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life." (page 57)
"The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, wioth my ear alone, before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car." (page 86)
"Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees-- he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder." (page 112)
Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. (page 112)
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (page 182)
"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will simply try to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by war." (intro)
The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are unable to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. We know only that in some strange melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad. (page 19)
To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself. (page 41)
Those are the wounded horse. But not all of them. Some gallop away in the distance, fall down, and then run on farther. The belly of one is ripped open, the guts trail out. He becomes tangled in them and falls, then he stands up again. (page 46-47)
We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down- now, for the first time in three days we can see his face, now for the first time in three days we can oppose him; we feel a mad anger. No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged. (page 78)
We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill. (page 79)
One morning two butterflies play in front of our trench. They are brimstone-butterflies, with red spots on their yellow wings. What can they be looking for here? There is not a plant not a flower for miles. They settle on the teeth of a skull. The birds too are just as carefree, they have long since accustomed themselves to the war. (page 87)
We see living men with their skulls blown open; we see soldiers run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell-hole; a lance-corporal crawls a mile and a half on his hands dragging his smashed knee after him; another goes to the dressing station and over his clasped hands bulge his intestines; we see men without mouths, without jaws; we find one man who has held the artery of his arm in his teeth for two hours in order not to bleed to death. The sun goes down, night comes, the shells whine, life is at an end. (page 91)
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how people are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that that keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing; -- it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?
