More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She was tall and lean with the far-seeing eyes of some fabulous savannah cat,
The bright grin was unexpected in this place, like a knife cutting through an opium fog.
remembered a cry that sounded as if it had been dug up from Daisy’s body, as if she had stretched out on the ground and someone had driven a spade deep into her.
The night before her wedding, Daisy taught me that after the world ended, you still had to get up in the morning, and the things that you ruined would still be there, needing to be fixed.
I could see that for him, the world was always ending. For him, it was all a wreck and a ruin, and he had no idea why the rest of us weren’t screaming.
made myself some very strong Turkish coffee to compensate. The harshness of the drink made me feel as if I was vibrating two inches beyond the barrier of my skin,
He stands on that pier, I thought suddenly. He stands there, and he looks across the water, and he looks across the years to when she was his and when she will be his.
He wasn’t a big man, but he wore his importance like a barred gate, and there was no getting around him.
Her voice sounded as well-balanced as a throwing knife, but she had no target at the moment,
He was built like a wall someone dressed up in decent tie and tails,
her limbs as careless as that of a marionette whose strings had given way.
Maybe if she breaks enough, something true will come out.
could see all the hollows of her face, how corpse-like she could look when the light inside her was flickering.
I remembered how the heat of that summer two years ago put a haze over both of them, as if I were seeing something strange and a little otherworldly, something I wasn’t meant to be seeing.
In all paper was fire,
and out of the corner of my eye, I saw prowling lions and the figures of young girls rattling in the shadows, thin enough that when they turned sideways, they would cease to be visible at all.
Let me tell you a story, and at the end, you shall tell me how it ends.”
“Do you care about anything?” It wasn’t an accusation, but an actual question.
She was half out of her robe like a snowdrop unsheathed after the winter, fragile and more than a little raw.
This was all uttered without rancor, but also without the thoughtlessness that accompanied so many of Daisy’s pronouncements. She said things, they lit up gold in the air, and then they fell to nothing like so much cigarette ash. This wasn’t something that floated around inside her head and then out her mouth. This was something she had put away somewhere dark, where the light wouldn’t fade it, where no one could talk her out of it.
The day when Daisy met Jay Gatsby again should have been beautiful, the same kind of day on which she had been married, or at least a crisp and dying summer day
silvery clouds hung overhead like wet rags out to dry,
He looked, I thought, like nothing so much as a cat who had endured a wetting in the garden, and now only cared about getting inside.
“And it’s only your opinion that matters?” “It’s the only opinion that matters to me,”
If he had said it bitterly or angrily, I would have had some defense against it. Instead there was a longing and sorrow there that I had not learned to guard against,
“Poor Nick,” I murmured with false sympathy. “Are you feeling quite overwhelmed, darling?” “Every day of my life,”
He told me yes in a way that was half a dream and half a daze,
Nick laughed, and I wondered if that was what love was, making someone forget the pain that gnawed at them and would not stop.
What does it look like when a thousand-year hunger gets a taste of what it’s craved? His eyes were pale before, but now there was something blackened and charred about them, sending up wisps of steam that I could almost feel but not see.
Nick, your house is just the dearest thing, but there’s not much space to lose oneself, is there?” “Just your mind, your memory, and your dignity,” Nick offered, and I smiled.
“Happiness must come later, don’t you think?” she said in wonder. “When you want something so very much, and then you have it?”
It should have felt as if we were intruding, but these two were made for an audience.
There was a hall made of glass where lush green plants wove together to scent the world with lemon, and bay and honey, and a hall roofed in what Gatsby told us was the longest night of the year in some town in Norway. We stood in that hall for several minutes, letting the Norwegian winter cool us down as shimmering green and violet lights danced above our heads. We could hear bells in that room, and the clacking of bone chimes hung up in lonely pine trees.
When you’re alone so much, realizing that you’re not is terribly upsetting.
While his voice lowered to something like the rumble of the mythical 21 train that ran from Manhattan to the city of Dis in Hell—
Under Klipspringer’s fingers, the jaunty little tune turned into something sad, something too wise and too bitter by half.
must have made a noise because Gatsby looked up at us. He wasn’t angry or sorry. Instead he was only confused. Wherever he was with Daisy, there were no names for other people. He had no idea who we were any longer.
Summer in New York goes by slowly until it goes by fast, and for the four weeks that took us out of July and into a sullen and ferociously fevered August,
she had made herself scarce, wrapping up in a kind of silken solitude
Even after all our time together, I hadn’t quite resigned myself to being a couple yet, half of an equation when the male half could somehow continue as a whole without me.
had no idea what the words meant, and they felt like rocks dropped in the middle of his otherwise perfect English.
People called Gatsby’s parties brilliant, de rigueur, the most exciting thing since M. Bartholdi and M. Eiffel raised first an island out of New York Harbor and then a gorgeous woman clothed in copper from the island.
The smile froze on his face, jagged like slips of lake ice.
There was something raw in his gaze right then, something trapped, something that was suddenly aware that its camouflage was not nearly as good as it had imagined it to be. I had stepped on some secret, obviously, but he had no idea which one, and no idea that I had no idea either.
“No one thinks I’m a Southern girl.” “And they shouldn’t. You’re some East Coast thing, aren’t you? Sharp and mean and cold.
It put me closer to him than ever, and this close, it was impossible to ignore my attraction to him, the way he could drink all the light out of the room and present it to you as if it was a special gift, his to give.
I was smart enough to know that they didn’t think I was,
but she gave me a look with eyes as dark as mine, and I had no experience reading them at all.
He let me get the last word, which was good because I was likely going to fight for it.
That night, I dreamed about sitting on a sticky tile floor, laughing crazily as I gathered up menus and receipts, cutting them, crushing them in my hands as I shaped the pieces into a soldier’s form, a gun in his hand and death in his eyes.
