The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person,

Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. 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.

I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.

delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War.

I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighbourhood.

I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew.

And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.

Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.

thin beard of raw ivy,

Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran towards the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.

Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face

Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.”

“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away.

the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

‘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.’

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

regarding the silver pepper of the stars.

the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses.

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

while his two motorboats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam.

his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains.

turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.

with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.

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 eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. 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.

the voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.

The tears coursed down her cheeks—not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky colour, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets.

“Wha’s matter?” he inquired calmly. “Did we run outa gas?” “Look!” Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel—he stared at it for a moment, and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky. “It came off,” someone explained. He nodded.

Everyone 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.

always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near.

Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town.

a dozen times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say.

So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprieto...

A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness.

all day long the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night. “Anyways, for an hour!”

the clear voices of children, already gathered like crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight:

He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths—so that he could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.

The rain cooled about half-past three to a damp mist, through which occasional thin drops swam like dew.

Gatsby looked with vacant eyes through a copy of Clay’s Economics,

when the demoniac Finn brought it in on a tray.

Once more it was pouring, and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by Gatsby’s gardener, abounded in small muddy swamps and prehistoric marshes. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby’s enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the “period” craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he’d agreed to pay five years’ taxes on all the neighbouring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family—he went into an immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.