F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby

He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished . . .

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know to disapprove. . . . At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.