The Great Gatsby Chapter 2 Quotes

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed.

They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.

The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

I enjoyed mayhem.

I wasn’t even vaguely engaged.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York.

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles.

Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer.

“Anything you want to in this room, just let me know,” he urged. “No thanks,” ejaculated Tom shortly. “I won’t do anything till you—enzyme—me to.”

I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

The Great Gatsby Chapter 2 Quotes part 2

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.

I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon.

I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice.

He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven.

Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

This little fluctuating business of the afternoon had taken up his earnest attention, and he was looking at her with unusual concentration.

She hesitated. “You know what I think of you.” “You’re crazy about me.” “I’m not.”

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon.

They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.

“Why candles?” objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers.

Several of them got into the papers, for the bullet-headed man had bought a machine-gun, and they had been roaring down the Long Island roads that morning, and the traffic was terrified into letting them have the right of way.

I think he hardly knew what he was saying, for when I asked him what business he was in he answered ‘That’s my affair,’ before he realized that it wasn’t the appropriate reply.

Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing in impassioned voices whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.

Taking a white card from his wallet he waved it before the man’s eyes. ‘Right you are,’ agreed the proprietor, ‘I’ll have somebody go around and make a record of it — your name would be enough. After that, if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to see the books.’

They were going to New York; Tom and Myrtle and I, in his coupe.

“Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,” he advised me. “Don’t believe everything you hear.” “I said a little to the waiter and he said, ‘Oh, I know Mr. Gatsby, he’s a bootlegger.’ ” “I hate that word.” “’No, you don’t,’ said Tom quickly. ’That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it?

You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.

“She’s not leaving me!” Tom’s words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby. “Certainly not for a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he put on her finger.”

He was among the few guests who had actually been invited.

It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.

I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.

Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever.

I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

He gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone — he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling.

He comes over to lunch at least once a week, and sees his son.

Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ash heaps, where small grey clouds took on fantastic shapes and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.