She was appalled by West Egg...by its raw vigor that chafed...and
by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along
a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful
in the very simplicity she failed to understand.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 6, on Daisy. |
He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps,
that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused
and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a
certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find
out what that thing was.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 6, on Gatsby. |
Can't repeat the past?…Why of course you can!
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 6, Gatsby. |
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. At his lips' touch she blossomed
for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 6, Gatsby on his first kiss with
Daisy. |
Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols
weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze
of the fans.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 7. |
Her voice is full of money.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1, Gatsby about Daisy. |
It occurred to me that there was no difference between men,
in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between
the sick and the well. Wilson was so sick that he looked guilty.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 7. |
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind,
and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic.
His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate,
were slipping precipitately from his control.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 7, Nick, on Tom Buchanan. |
I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away.
There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all
sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 7, Jordan. |
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.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 7, Tom Buchanan on Gatsby. |
With every word she was drawing further and further into herself,
so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the
afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible,
struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice
across the room.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 7. |
....the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list
of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning
hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was
too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age....So
we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 7. |
Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen
table....They weren't happy...yet they weren't unhappy either.
There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the
picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring
together.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 7. |
It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy
- it increased her value in his eyes.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 8. |
God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing.
You may fool me, but you can't fool God!
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 8. |
"They are a rotten crowd," I shouted across the
lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."
I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment
I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning
to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into
that radiant and understanding smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic
cahoots on that fact all the time.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 8, Nick on Gatsby. |
He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid
a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must
have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves
and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and
how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A
new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing
dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen,
fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 8. |
He 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...his
grief began to be mixed with an awed pride.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 9. |
When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it
in any way. I keep out. When I was a young man it was different...I
stuck with them to the end...Let us learn to show friendship
for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 9. |
Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone
now forever. I can't forget so long as I live the night they
shot Rosy Rosenthal there....they shot him three times in the
belly and drove away.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 9. |
After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that,
distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction. So when the blue
smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the
wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 9. |
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up
things and creatures and then retreated back into their money
of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them
together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 9, Nick on the Buchanans. |
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were
hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat
across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential
houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of
the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a
fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the
trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered
in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for
a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath
in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic
contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face
for the last time in history with something commensurate to
his capacity for wonder.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 9. |
And as I sat there, brooding on the old, unknown world, I
thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out Daisy's
light at the end of his dock. He had come such a long way to
this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could
hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it
was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond
the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under
the night.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 9. |
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic 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-
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 9. |
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly
into the past.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 9, Nick on resilience. |
Sex
and the City
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