All-American quote

So is there an all-defining quote for us all to be found in US fiction?

It's a tough one to pick but the honours go to the perennially confused, somewhat shocked narrator of 'The Great Gatsby', Nick Carraway, who announces early in the action:

“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.”