In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights.
Laughter is easier, minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.
He got it from Dan Cody’s yacht.
He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in.
Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all.
My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.
It was indirectly due to Cody that Gatsby drank so little.
I had a dozen intimacies on the Peninsula alone.
He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.
I wouldn’t ask too much of her.
Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me. You’ve got to try hard. I can’t go through this alone.
I am getting the wind in that little sail.
He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying.
Some one with a positive manner, perhaps.
There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that.
I hate careless people.
Let’s go to town.
What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there.
A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair.
Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.
The Great Gatsby Chapter 3 Quotes part 2
He’s a bootlegger, ‘oh, no!’ said the first girl, ‘he’s the son of God.’
This is Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Klipspringer.
A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling.
I’ve had my nose in the drug-store ceiling since two o’clock. . . .
It was Gatsby’s mansion.
In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.
He’s a gambler. Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.
The evening had made me light-headed and happy; I think I walked into a deep sleep as I entered my front door.
The orchestra took up the tune again.
I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.
The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile.
There was a burst of chatter as the erroneous news went around that she was Gilda Gray’s understudy from the Follies.
When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was beside the curb.
At two o’clock Gatsby put on his bathing-suit and left word with the butler that if any one phoned word was to be brought to him at the pool.
It was in the morning, I remember, when we parted company.
My God, I believe the man’s coming, said Tom. ‘Doesn’t he know she doesn’t want him?’
Gatsby’s eyes floated toward her.
She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door.
She was now waiting for the longest day of the year to pass so that she could decide whether she wanted to go back to Tom or not.
Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.
In a moment she looked back at me with a dark smile.
She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York.
She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.
And in the end, in the end the party was over.
Be First to Comment