The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

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

Instead of rambling this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside

I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.’

I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. 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.

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.

He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.

He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

‘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 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.

‘Don’t be morbid,’ Jordan said. ‘Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.’

Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.’

Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead.

So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing.

It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody—told it to me because ‘Jay Gatsby’ had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice

It excited him too that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes.

had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and splendor of the hall and the great rooms opening out from it into other rooms his grief began to be mixed with an awed pride.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made….

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.