“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently.

He turned him up, all his legs walking in the air, and looked at his jointed belly.

I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice.

Bill selected a sandwich from the lunch basket and walked over to have a look at the rods.

He spread the mouth of the sack and looked down in at the two big trout alive in the water.

They hanged Sam Cardinella at six o’clock in the morning in the corridor of the county jail.

“Don’t look at me,” Daisy retorted, “I’ve been trying to get you to New York all afternoon.”

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

On the train from Padua to Milan they quarreled about her not being willing to come home at once.

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

They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital.

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

At two o’clock in the morning two Hungarians got into a cigar store at Fifteenth Street and Grand Avenue.

Her frown had not abated and he stared at her anxiously, making no comment and daring scarcely to breathe.

“We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

He reported at Bologna, and I took him with me up into the Romagna where it was necessary I go to see a man.

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

Dick kneeled down in the sand and looked at the mark of the scaler’s hammer in the wood at the end of the log.

Villalta, his hand up at the crowd and the bull roaring blood, looking straight at Villalta and his legs caving.

When they had to say goodbye, in the station at Milan, they kissed goodbye, but were not finished with the quarrel.

At Bologna he said goodbye to us to go on the train to Milano and then to Aosta to walk over the pass into Switzerland.

Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all.

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.

There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked⁠—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end.

“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more.

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.

She bit Uncle George on the arm and Uncle George said, “Damn squaw bitch!” and the young Indian who had rowed Uncle George over laughed at him.

At first Krebs, who had been at Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, St. Mihiel and in the Argonne did not want to talk about the war at all.

At the cantina near the bridge they trusted him for three more grappas because he was so confident and mysterious about his job for the afternoon.

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.

At this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness that I started⁠—it was the first word she had uttered since I came into the room.

My old man and Holbrook and a fat wop in a straw hat that kept wiping his face with a handkerchief were having an argument at a table in the Galleria.

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.

Then he cursed the bull, flopped the muleta at him, and swung back from the charge, his feet firm, the muleta curving and at each swing the crowd roaring.

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.

My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season.

He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone.

While he watched the coffee on the fire, he drank the juice syrup of the apricots, carefully at first to keep from spilling, then meditatively, sucking the apricots down.

He’d be reading the Paris-Sport and he’d look over at me and say, “Where’s your girl, Joe?” to kid me on account I had told him about the girl that day at the next table.

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.

I lived at West Egg, the⁠—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them.

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.

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.

They were tired of Dijon and anyway would now be able to say that after leaving Harvard or Columbia or Wabash, they had studied at the University of Dijon, down in the Côte d’Or.

She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall.

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.

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.

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.