Quotes About Deception

After all, he reflected, his whole uniform was a disguise, his whole new calling a masquerade.

FOR WE ARE like tree trunks in the snow . In appearance they lie sleekly and a light push should be enough to set them rolling . No , it can't be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.   Unhappiness

But he knew that he was in Daisy's house by a colossal accident. However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously - eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand

Had his shim picks

Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.

She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.

Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning.

When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it.

She was incurably dishonest.

Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.

God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!

What was it? Why won't you tell me? I don't want to break down your illusions. My dear man, I have no illusions about you. I mean illusions about yourself.

If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.

Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy or Gatsby anymore, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal skepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm.

Biography is the falsest of the arts.

You like to help everybody, don't you? I only pretend to.

It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people- with the single mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone—

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his platonic conception of himself.

They proceeded with an infinite guile that would have horrified her parents.