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Adults understand this, intrinsically, marked as they are by the years, time wreathing them in layers: an onion growing round and waxy in the earth.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
‘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.’
Yikes Daisy.
They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.
“I am careful.” “No, you’re not.” “Well, other people are,” she said lightly. “What’s that got to do with it?” “They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”
Sounds like a pretty selfish way to live.
“I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.”
CRAZY to say from the man who is in fact running around.
“You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
Cool quote
“Self-control!” repeated Tom incredulously. “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out.… Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.”
Here is the racism I missed and also Tom is just literally the worst.
When anyone spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable, colorless way. He was his wife’s man and not his own.
She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at
Impulsive and annoying
“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he suggested. “After that my own rule is to let everything alone.”
LOVE this one.
“Nevertheless you did throw me over,” said Jordan suddenly. “You threw me over on the telephone. I don’t give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while.”
Jordan is such a nut.
“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”
This made me laugh
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.…
Selfish human beings. All of them.
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