Great Gatsby

Excerpt from the book:In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."e;Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,"e; he told me, "e;just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."e;He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.

In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

Most of the confidences were unsought-frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.