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we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way,
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—
There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air.
My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked,
shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room
“Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.”
The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.
Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled back into the library,
Our white girlhood was passed together there.
I had no intention of being rumored into marriage.
The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.
handsome and horrible.
People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.
“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day.
I could see nothing sinister about him.
she was not only singing, she was weeping too.
most affectations conceal something eventually,
He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it or choked on it as though it had bothered him before.
A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms,
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
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.
I felt that there were guests concealed behind every couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we had passed through.
Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.
There must have been moments even that afternoon when 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.
I think that voice held him most with its fluctuating, feverish warmth because it couldn’t be over-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song.
They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn’t know me now at all.
So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.
is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
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.
Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five years of unwavering devotion.
After she had obliterated three years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken.
He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.
. . . 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.
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.
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.
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
Generally he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn’t working he sat on a chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passed along the road. When any one spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable, colorless way. He was his wife’s man and not his own.
He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil.
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.
He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously—eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.
He felt married to her, that was all.
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?”
The afternoon had made them tranquil
he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
He stayed there a week, walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which they had driven in her white car.
He left feeling that if he had searched harder he might have found her—that he was leaving her behind.
