In his blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
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.
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget.
There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner.
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.
My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand.
He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he knew that my faithless glance had found her again.
Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle, but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the human being underneath were too violent to be completely hidden.
She sprang up, making a short, deft movement toward the table, and then paused to look at her guests, framing a thin invisible triangle with her arms.
There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms up-stairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors, and of romances that danced like light upon the sea.
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.
Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever.
There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.
The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.
I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
The mediocre dead had no ritual whose absence they might deplore.
There was a bartender he knew of…who reputed to be a nephew of Tweed, or a cousin of the devil…but no one had actually seen him.
I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited.
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible.
I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.
My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand.
An hour later the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie hurried in.
The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.
It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
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.
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.
There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights.
He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it.
I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom, and Gatsby, Daisy, and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he knew that my faithless glance had found her again.
He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he knew that my faithless glance had found her again.
It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner.
Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget.
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