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“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams

“Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.”
― William Kennedy, Roscoe

“The trick to loneliness is to spend a lot of time inside one’s head.”
― Pat R, O Pijama da Gata

“Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.”
― William Kennedy, Roscoe

“He cared only about people; he was scarcely conscious of places except for their weather, until they had been invested with color by tangible events.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper.”
― William Kennedy, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

“It really was a whole generation who were listening to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Sonny Rollins, James Moody, Fats Navarro and, a little bit later on, Mongo Santamaría and Chuck Berry, and these dozen or so guys gave them a voice. They led the way. They wrote what a whole generation wanted to read. The time was right and they seized the day by writing about their lives. They travelled, they got into scrapes, they got arrested, they got wasted �� and they wrote about it.

Isn’t that something?”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.”
― Clement Alexander Price, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

“She clicked open the door and glided into the back seat like a summer breeze through an open window on the highway. "Where are you heading?", His Southern twang reminded her of home, but her eyes showed him no familiarity. She stared at him, void of expression, her thoughts racing. "Miss?", he persisted. "Anywhere. Please. Just drive.", she replied tersely, not sure if she even wanted her mind to join her in the back seat. The driver stared into her eyes and somehow understood, he started the engine and on they went. Two strangers, a blur of yellow, in pursuit of nowhere.”
― RJ Arkhipov

“Turn it," Thomas said, without smiling. "Play it again.”
― Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues

“This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”
― F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“We was all of us free, brother. For that night at least, we was free.”
― Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues

“A man ain't never seen greatness till he set eyes on the likes of Armstrong. That the truth. Those hooded lids, that blinding smile: the jack was immense, majestic. But something else too: he looked brutally human, like he known suffering on its own terms. His mouth was shocking. He done wrecked his chops from the pressure of hitting all them high notes over the years. He lift a handkerchief to his mouth, wipe off a line of spittle. I seen something in him then: a sort of devastated patience, a awful tiredness. I known that look. My mama had it all her life.”
― Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues

“Today you ain't no kind of horn player you don't acknowledge some debt to Hieronymus Falk. He was one of the pioneers: a German Louis Armstrong, if you will.”
― Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues

“He begun to tease air through the brass. At first we all just stood there with our axes at the ready, staring at him. Nothing happened. I glanced at Chip, shook my head. But then I begun to hear, like a pinprick on the air--it was that subtle--the voice of a hummingbird singing at a pitch and speed almost beyond hearing. Wasn't like nothing I ever heard before. The kid come in at a strange angle, made the notes glitter like crystal. Pausing, he took a huge breath, started playing a ear-spitting scale that drawn out the invisible phrase he'd just played.”
― Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues

“I could see that he could taste the salt of her lips, each kiss like a summer wave breaking on an empty beach. She was the fragrant taste his mouth desired. She wanted it all -- lust, love, the deepest of kisses, with the added touch of the most savage of handlings. Together, they wanted to be loved through the language of an honest tongue, devoted heart, and exclusive eyes set only for one another. No matter if they had someone else, they would, in the end, have one another. A false image that they would never forget.”
― W.M Angel, Atlas Loved

“An air of malaise had spread through Café Society and quite acutely in her coterie, friends impatient to find their way to the lightness, their place in the sun. The Great Depression cast shadows on the city. The roar of the Twenties had quieted to a soulful cry of the blues.”
― Pamela L Hamilton, Lady Be Good Lib/E: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“The Great Depression cast shadows on the city. The roar of the Twenties had quieted to a soulful cry of the blues.”
― Pamela Hamilton