She was very frightened and didn’t know how he was going to go about things but she snuggled close to him.

Nick’s father went into the kitchen and poured about half of the water out of the big kettle into a basin.

Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

This absorbing information about my neighbour was interrupted by Mrs. McKee’s pointing suddenly at Catherine:

When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or enema.

They felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.

He went under the anaesthetic holding tight on to himself so he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time.

His eventual conclusions about the expediency of service were vague, but concerning his own relation to it they were abrupt and decisive.

They were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night.

The night before they were to come back she didn’t sleep at all, that is she didn’t think she slept because it was all mixed up in a dream about not sleeping and really not sleeping.

Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.

He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

They had drifted up onto the beach and if nothing were done about them sooner or later the crew of the Magic would come along the shore in a rowboat, spot the logs, drive an iron spike with a ring on it into the end of each one and then tow them out into the lake to make a new boom.