The crowd shouted all the time, and threw pieces of bread down into the bull ring, then cushions and leather wine bottles, keeping up whistling and yelling.

Nick struck and the rod came alive and dangerous, bent double, the line tightening, coming out of water, tightening, all in a heavy, dangerous, steady pull.

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.

In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

When they stopped the music for the crouch he hunched down in the street with them all and when they started it again he jumped up and went dancing down the street with them.

When she looked at them they didn’t seem to be moving at all but if she went in and dried some more dishes and then came out again they would be out of sight beyond the point.

Elliot had a number of friends by now, all of whom admired his poetry, and Mrs. Elliot had prevailed on him to send over to Boston for her girl friend who had been in the tea shop.

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.

Imagine having them around the house all the time and going to Sunday dinners at their house, and having them over to dinner and her telling Marge all the time what to do and how to act.

There was the sun, letting down great glowing masses of heat; there was life, active and snarling, moving about them like a fly swarm⁠—the dark pants of smoke from the engine, a crisp “all aboard!” and a bell ringing.

No⁠—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire.

My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires⁠—all for eighty dollars a month.

She had seemed much younger, in fact, she had seemed not to have any age at all, when Elliot had married her after several weeks of making love to her, after knowing her for a long time in her tea shop before he had kissed her one evening.

So they all sat around the Café du Dome, avoiding the Rotonde across the street because it is always so full of foreigners, for a few days, and then the Elliots rented a château in Touraine, through an advertisement in the New York Herald.

Gosh, I was so excited, I was afraid to look at them, but I fixed the glasses on the place where they would come out back of the trees and then out they came with the old black jacket going third and they all sailing over the jump like birds.

The schooner moved out of the bay toward the open lake carrying the two great saws, the traveling carriage that hurled the logs against the revolving, circular saws and all the rollers, wheels, belts and iron piled on a hull-deep load of lumber.

I was rather literary in college⁠—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News⁠—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.”

The days on the boat were very long and all very much like each other except that sometimes the sun shone, but the wind did not stop blowing, and although the boat was very expensive and had elevators and a swimming pool and everyone spoke with an English accent, yet it took eight days to reach Europe.

When they all stepped back on the scaffolding back of the drop, which was very heavy, built of oak and steel and swung on ball bearings, Sam Cardinella was left sitting there strapped tight with the rope around his neck, the younger of the two priests kneeling beside the chair holding up a little crucifix.

All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.

Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration, and when he occasionally met another man who had really been a soldier and they talked a few minutes in the dressing room at a dance he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face, or that maybe his mother had been frightened or seen something, or that he had, maybe, bumped into something as a young child, but I finally had somebody verify the story from Spider Kelly.

George was coming down in telemark position, kneeling; one leg forward and bent, the other trailing; his sticks hanging like some insect’s thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow as they touched the surface and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow.