The Great Gatsby (1925) - Francis Scott Fitzgerald

They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening  too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase towards its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.
(p. 19)



There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.
(p. 45)



He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four of five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.  Precisely at that point it vanished - and I was looking at an elegant young round-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.
(p. 54)



"Now you're started on the subject," she answered with a wan smile. "Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man."
A dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away.
"However, I don't believe it."
(p. 55)



It is invariabely saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
(p.111)


They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
(p.156)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) - Jonathan Safran Foer

She also gave me Grandpa's camera, which I loved for two reasons. I asked why he didn't take it with him when he left her. She said, "Maybe he wanted you to have it." I said, "But I was negative-thirty years old." She said, "Still."
(p. 3)



In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots.
(p. 38)


That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.
(p. 71)


Time was passing by like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
(p. 224)


We got at the end of the line for the elevator.
I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
(p. 247)


It broke my heart into more pieces that my heart was made of.
(pas noté la page)