The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.

I’m inclined to reserve all judgments,

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business.

Narrator's job

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

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.

‘This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and——’ After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. ‘—and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?’

Nordics

‘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 supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.

Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.

‘You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.’

East Egg condescending to West Egg,

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside.

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

‘It takes two to make an accident.’

Her grey, 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.

‘There’s the kind of man you’d like to take home and introduce to your mother and sister.’

Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more but of this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: ‘There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.’

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled and so I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.