He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it.

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.

All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.

Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people.

So I went down and caught up with them and grabbed him while he was crouched down waiting for the music to break loose and said, “Come on, Luis.”

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.

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.

They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.

When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned towards me.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

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.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him⁠—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office.

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.

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.

Some men picked Maera up and started to run with him toward the barriers through the gate out the passage way around under the grandstand to the infirmary.

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.

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 horse’s entrails hung down in a blue bunch and swung backward and forward as he began to canter, the monos whacking him on the back of his legs with the rods.

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.

The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can’t have more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he couldn’t hardly get the sword in.

Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe⁠—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business.

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.

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.

Finally the bull was too tired from so much sticking and folded his knees and lay down and one of the cuadrilla leaned out over his neck and killed him with the puntillo.

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.

I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War.

One day she found that she liked it the way the hair was black on his arms and how white they were above the tanned line when he washed up in the washbasin outside the house.

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 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.

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.

There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym.

The crowd came over the barrera and around the torero and two men grabbed him and held him and someone cut off his pigtail and was waving it and a kid grabbed it and ran away with it.

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see.

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.

It was very beautiful in the spring and summer, the bay blue and bright and usually whitecaps on the lake out beyond the point from the breeze blowing from Charlevoix and Lake Michigan.

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.

There was the general store and postoffice with a high false front and maybe a wagon hitched out in front, Smith’s house, Stroud’s house, Fox’s house, Horton’s house and Van Hoosen’s house.

We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

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.

She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring.

He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.

He drew out the sword from the folds of the muleta and sighted with the same movement and called to the bull, Toro! Toro! and the bull charged and Villalta charged and just for a moment they became one.

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.

I had a dog⁠—at least I had him for a few days until he ran away⁠—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

Before I could reply that he was my neighbour dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise⁠—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression⁠—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

They are not perfect ovals⁠—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end⁠—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead.