This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Overall this book was a meh. It followed Amory Blaine as a child, prep schooler, collegian at Princeton, and early career man. His friendships and love interests felt disconnected, and as a character, he seemed overly intellectual and self-indulgent. Characters sometimes have long, unrealistic monologues.

These were my favorite quotes.

His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

Another, after he had lost his money and carefree college lifestyle.

"I detest poor people," thought Amory suddenly. "I hate them for being poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it's rotten now. It's the ugliest thing in the world. It's essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor."

At the bottom:

Usually, on night like this, for there had been many lately, he could escape from this consuming introspection by thinking of children and the infinite possibilities of children -- he leaned and listened and he heard a startled baby awake in a house across the street and lend a tiny whimper to the still night. Quick as a flash he turned away, wondering with a touch of panic whether something in the brooding despair of his mood had make a darkness in its tiny soul. He shivered. What if some day the balance was overturned, and he became a thing that frightened children and crept into rooms in the dark, approached dim communion with those phantoms who whispered shadowy secrets to the mad of that dark continent upon the moon....