"Well, I think Phil's got a fairly good chance of getting in there, maybe even on a scholarship. It sounds fine; still, all I know about Harvard is the reputation, you know - the outside view. And that's sort of like the Empire State Building, right? You see it from a distance, maybe at sunset, and it's this majestic, beautiful thing. Then you get inside, you walk around a couple of the lower floors, and it turns out to be one of the sleaziest office buildings in New York: there's nothing in there but small-time insurance agencies and costume-jewellery wholesalers. There isn't any reason for the tallest building in the world. So you ride all the way up to the top and your eardrums hurt and you're out there at the parapet looking out, looking down, and even that's a disappointment because you've seen it all in photographs so many times. Right? So I don't know; I think Phil and I'd better go up to Harvard for a couple of days and kind of snoop around."

“He seemed decent and kindly enough, but Prentice was cautioned by an old and trusted rule of his schooldays: Beware of the first friendly one; he's probably an outcast himself.”

“there is an automatic pleasure in watching a thing done well.”

“All I'm trying to say is that I'm afraid I got a kind of who-cares feeling out of this. Very strong writing, fine writing; still, the material kept making me think, Yeah, yeah, I get it, but who cares?”

“How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their gray-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting mid-town office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.”

“Another thing I have always liked about both Gatsby and Bovary, wrote, "is that there are no villains in either one. The force of evil is felt in these novels but is never personified—neither novel is willing to let us off that easily.”

“Most people do the best they can.”