âIn my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that Iâve been turning over in my mind ever since. âWhenever you feel like criticising anyone,â he told me, âjust remember that all the people in this world havenât had the advantages that youâve had.ââ
â(...) I like large parties. Theyâre so intimate. At small parties there isnât any privacy.â
â(...) his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairyâs wing.âÂ
âHe talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was âŠâÂ













