★ A Breath of Life

” But his heart was in constant, turbulent riot. The more grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fanvies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace”

So basically this guy makes up his entirelife. He changes his name when he’s seventeen and “his imagination had never really accepted [his parents] as his parents at all”, he “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself”.

and for the part that I find so poetic and beautifully written:

“For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”

From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby