The Great Gatsby

==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 41-46  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:03 PM

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. “How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. 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.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 50-51  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:04 PM

now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 219-21  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:16 PM

I couldn’t guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 240-44  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:18 PM

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 295-96  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:21 PM

When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 390-94  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:33 PM

I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it, although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes, and I went out to buy some at the drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared, so I sat down discreetly in the living-room and read a chapter of SIMON CALLED PETER.—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things, because it didn’t make any sense to me.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 464-80  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:37 PM

The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the Mediterranean—then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me back into the room. “I almost made a mistake, too,” she declared vigorously. “I almost married a little kyke who’d been after me for years. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept saying to me: ‘Lucille, that man’s ‘way below you!’ But if I hadn’t met Chester, he’d of got me sure.” “Yes, but listen,” said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down, “at least you didn’t marry him.” “I know I didn’t.” “Well, I married him,” said Myrtle, ambiguously. “And that’s the difference between your case and mine.” “Why did you, Myrtle?” demanded Catherine. “Nobody forced you to.” Myrtle considered. “I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,” she said finally. “I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.” “You were crazy about him for a while,” said Catherine. “Crazy about him!” cried Myrtle incredulously. “Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there.” She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past. “The only CRAZY I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out. ‘oh, is that your suit?’ I said. ‘this is the first I ever heard about it.’ But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to beat the band all afternoon.”
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 489-94  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:39 PM

“It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I told him I’d have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’”
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 593-99  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:48 PM

“I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,” he assured us positively. “Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.” As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.” She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 604-7  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:48 PM

“Let’s get out,” whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half-hour. “This is much too polite for me.” We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host: I had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 652-59  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:51 PM

“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.” 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. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 790-95  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:59 PM

At first I was flattered to go places with her, because she was a golf champion, and every one knew her name. Then it was something more. I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something—most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning—and one day I found what it was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it—and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal—then died away.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 797-803  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 08:59 PM

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. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body. It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man’s coat.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 803-12  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 09:00 PM

“You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.” “I am careful.” “No, you’re not.” “Well, other people are,” she said lightly. “What’s that got to do with it?” “They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.” “Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.” “I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.” Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 815  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 09:00 PM

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.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1112-20  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:23 PM

“I have been glancing into some of the rooms. Let’s go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car.” “It’s too late.” “Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming-pool? I haven’t made use of it all summer.” “I’ve got to go to bed.” “All right.” He waited, looking at me with suppressed eagerness. “I talked with Miss Baker,” I said after a moment. “I’m going to call up Daisy to-morrow and invite her over here to tea.” “Oh, that’s all right,” he said carelessly. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.” “What day would suit you?” “What day would suit YOU?” he corrected me quickly. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble, you see.”
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1224-30  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:29 PM

I went in—after making every possible noise in the kitchen, short of pushing over the stove—but I don’t believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as if some question had been asked, or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy’s face was smeared with tears, and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room. “Oh, hello, old sport,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. I thought for a moment he was going to shake hands.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1255-65  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:31 PM

And inside, as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music-rooms and Restoration salons, I felt that there were guests concealed behind every couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we had passed through. As Gatsby closed the door of “the Merton College Library.” I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter. We went up-stairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing-rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths—intruding into one chamber where a dishevelled man in pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. It was Mr. Klipspringer, the “boarder.” I had seen him wandering hungrily about the beach that morning. Finally we came to Gatsby’s own apartment, a bedroom and a bath, and an Adam study, where we sat down and drank a glass of some Chartreuse he took from a cupboard in the wall. He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1311-20  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:33 PM

“I don’t play well. I don’t—I hardly play at all. I’m all out of prac——” “We’ll go down-stairs,” interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The gray windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light. In the music-room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He lit Daisy’s cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across the room, where there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall. When Klipspringer had played THE LOVE NEST. he turned around on the bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom. “I’m all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn’t play. I’m all out of prac——” “Don’t talk so much, old sport,” commanded Gatsby. “Play!” “IN THE MORNING, IN THE EVENING, AIN’T WE GOT FUN——”
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1322-30  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:34 PM

“ONE THING’S SURE AND NOTHING’S SURER THE RICH GET RICHER AND THE POOR GET—CHILDREN. IN THE MEANTIME, IN BETWEEN TIME——” As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon whe Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1332-34  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:34 PM

They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn’t know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Bookmark Loc. 1442  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:43 PM


==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1443-44  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:43 PM

and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy’s eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1486-93  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:46 PM

Almost the last thing I remember was standing with Daisy and watching the moving-picture director and his Star. They were still under the white plum tree and their faces were touching except for a pale, thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and kiss at her cheek. “I like her,” said Daisy, “I think she’s lovely.” But the rest offended her—and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented “place.” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village—appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1507-12  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:47 PM

Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air. “Lots of people come who haven’t been invited,” she said suddenly. “That girl hadn’t been invited. They simply force their way in and he’s too polite to object.” “I’d like to know who he is and what he does,” insisted Tom. “And I think I’ll make a point of finding out.”
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1534-39  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:49 PM

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!” He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.” 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.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1541-53  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:51 PM

. . . One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. 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. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1674-78  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 11:58 PM

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of——” I hesitated. “Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. . . . high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl. . . .
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1823-29  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:06 AM

“He isn’t causing a row.” Daisy looked desperately from one to the other. “You’re causing a row. Please have a little self-control.” “Self-control!” Repeated Tom incredulously. “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out. . . . Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.” Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization. “We’re all white here,” murmured Jordan.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1856-72  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:08 AM

“You’re revolting,” said Daisy. She turned to me, and her voice, dropping an octave lower, filled the room with thrilling scorn: “Do you know why we left Chicago? I’m surprised that they didn’t treat you to the story of that little spree.” Gatsby walked over and stood beside her. “Daisy, that’s all over now,” he said earnestly. “It doesn’t matter any more. Just tell him the truth—that you never loved him—and it’s all wiped out forever.” She looked at him blindly. “Why—how could I love him—possibly?” “You never loved him.” She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, as though she realized at last what she was doing—and as though she had never, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done now. It was too late. “I never loved him,” she said, with perceptible reluctance. “Not at Kapiolani?” demanded Tom suddenly. “No.” From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were drifting up on hot waves of air. “Not that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your shoes dry?” There was a husky tenderness in his tone. . . . “Daisy?” “Please don’t.” Her voice was cold, but the rancor was gone from it. She looked at Gatsby. “There, Jay,” she said—but her hand as she tried to light a cigarette was trembling. Suddenly she threw the cigarette and the burning match on the carpet. “Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.” She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once—but I loved you too.”
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1873-90  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:09 AM

“You loved me TOO?” he repeated. “Even that’s a lie,” said Tom savagely. “She didn’t know you were alive. Why—there’re things between Daisy and me that you’ll never know, things that neither of us can ever forget.” The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby. “I want to speak to Daisy alone,” he insisted. “She’s all excited now——” “Even alone I can’t say I never loved Tom,” she admitted in a pitiful voice. “It wouldn’t be true.” “Of course it wouldn’t,” agreed Tom. She turned to her husband. “As if it mattered to you,” she said. “Of course it matters. I’m going to take better care of you from now on.” “You don’t understand,” said Gatsby, with a touch of panic. “You’re not going to take care of her any more.” “I’m not?” Tom opened his eyes wide and laughed. He could afford to control himself now. “Why’s that?” “Daisy’s leaving you.” “Nonsense.” “I am, though,” she said with a visible effort. “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.” “I won’t stand this!” cried Daisy. “Oh, please let’s get out.” “Who are you, anyhow?” broke out Tom. “You’re one of that bunch that hangs around with Meyer Wolfsheim—that much I happen to know. I’ve made a little investigation into your affairs—and I’ll carry it further to-morrow.”
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1911-21  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:11 AM

“You two start on home, Daisy,” said Tom. “In Mr. Gatsby’s car.” She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn. “Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over.” They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts, even from our pity. After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of whiskey in the towel. “Want any of this stuff? Jordan? . . . Nick?” I didn’t answer. “Nick?” He asked again. “What?” “Want any?” “No . . . I just remembered that to-day’s my birthday.” I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1924-26  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:12 AM

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 1927  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:12 AM

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 2088-92  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:51 AM

“You ought to go away,” I said. “It’s pretty certain they’ll trace your car.” “Go away NOW, old sport?” “Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal.” He wouldn’t consider it. He couldn’t possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn’t bear to shake him free.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 2103-5  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:52 AM

But he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a colossal accident. However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously—
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Bookmark Loc. 2119  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:54 AM


==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 2118-25  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:54 AM

“I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. . . . Well, there I was, ‘way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?” On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy in his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day, with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his arm a little, and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised. They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 2134-40  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:56 AM

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand. That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position, and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was still at Oxford.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 2155-62  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:58 AM

He left feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have found her—that he was leaving her behind. The day-coach—he was penniless now—was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a folding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street. The track curved and now it was going away from the sun, which as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 2176-82  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 12:59 AM

“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time. His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps, and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home, three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 2503-14  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 01:36 AM

She was dressed to play golf, and I remember thinking she looked like a good illustration, her chin raised a little jauntily, her hair the color of an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint as the fingerless glove on her knee. When I had finished she told me without comment that she was engaged to another man. I doubted that, though there were several she could have married at a nod of her head, but I pretended to be surprised. For just a minute I wondered if I wasn’t making a mistake, then I thought it all over again quickly and got up to say good-bye. “Nevertheless you did throw me over,” said Jordan suddenly. “You threw me over on the telephone. I don’t give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while.” We shook hands. “Oh, and do you remember.”—she added——” a conversation we had once about driving a car?” “Why—not exactly.” “You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.” “I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 2514-15  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 01:36 AM

She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
==========
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Highlight Loc. 2547-49  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 01:40 AM

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.