“Jerry,” says Jack, “you can’t have an idea what it gets to be like.”

The funny thing was it looked as though Jack was an open classic boxer.

They could both see the two steel rods at an angle over the dark water.

He sets down an earthenware pitcher that he has filled from one of the casks.

I’ve tried so very hard, but she doesn’t seem to take an interest in anything.

Of course, the great thing in this sort of an affair is not to be shot oneself.

A kidder gets to be an awful thing around a camp if his stuff goes sort of sour.

Would you go and find Hogan and tell him we want to see him in about half an hour?

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller.

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness.

I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

So they played cribbage for about half an hour and Jack won a dollar and a half off him.

An Irishman don’t draw in New York like a Jew or an Italian but they always get a good hand.

His eyes glanced momentarily at me, and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh.

Tom threw on both brakes impatiently, and we slid to an abrupt dusty stop under Wilson’s sign.

He executed an abrupt about-face and returned to the living room, where he renewed his pacing.

I thought he must be figuring on taking an awful beating if he doesn’t want to go home afterward.

After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again.

Someone, a very good friend, told me once, ‘No foreigner can make an American girl a good husband.’

This isn’t just an epigram⁠—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was dark inside and at the back of the room three girls were sitting at a table with an old woman.

I had been wounded, it was true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was really an accident.

The pink wall of the house opposite had fallen out from the roof, and an iron bedstead hung twisted toward the street.

I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl.

And I came up and my old man acted just as though the two of them weren’t standing there and said, “Want an ice, Joe?”

They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation.

For the second time that evening Anthony’s mind made an abrupt jump, and what he said was not at all what he had intended to say.

I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Each time Nick set a heavy slab of driftwood across the butt of the rod to hold it solid and propped it up at an angle with a small slab.

One day I had said that Italian seemed such an easy language to me that I could not take a great interest in it; everything was so easy to say.

He had gone out to the front from the military academy and been wounded within an hour after he had gone into the front line for the first time.

They reached New York in March after an expensive and ill-advised week spent in Hot Springs, and Anthony resumed his abortive attempts at fiction.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon.

She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet.

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction⁠—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.

If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it⁠—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

They had taken him for a soldier in nineteen fourteen when he had come back to visit his family, and they had given him to me for an orderly because he spoke English.

He remembered there were nine because Joe Garner, driving along in the dusk, pulled up the horses, jumped down into the road and dragged an Indian out of the wheel rut.

Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an invisible glass.

Precisely at that point it vanished⁠—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.

While they were in our corner I watched him tie Walcott up, get his right hand loose, turn it and come up with an uppercut that got Walcott’s nose with the heel of the glove.

I glanced at Daisy, who was staring terrified between Gatsby and her husband, and at Jordan, who had begun to balance an invisible but absorbing object on the tip of her chin.

She was got up to the best of her ability as a siren, more popularly a “vamp”⁠—a picker up and thrower away of men, an unscrupulous and fundamentally unmoved toyer with affections.

Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the restaurant, whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.

The conversation worked itself jerkily toward a rather abrupt conclusion, when Anthony rose, looked at his watch, and remarked that he had an engagement with his broker that afternoon.

When Mr. Turner came into the room he saw clothing on a chair, an open suitcase, the bottle on a chair beside the bed, and someone lying in the bed completely covered by the bedclothes.

On the other side there was glass, then the corridor, then an open window, and outside the window were dusty trees and an oiled road and flat fields of grapes, with gray-stone hills behind them.

It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase towards its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.