When they came toward him with the cap to go over his head Sam Cardinella lost control of his sphincter muscles.

Nick sat against the wall of the church where they had dragged him to be clear of machine gun fire in the street.

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

They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates.

They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained.

We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air.

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.

The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house.

I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.

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

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.

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.

She liked it the way he walked over from the shop and often went to the kitchen door to watch for him to start down the road.

There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.

Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

“Those must boil,” he said, and began to scrub his hands in the basin of hot water with a cake of soap he had brought from the camp.

“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.”

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.

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.”

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.

Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter, the major of the battalion made love to Ag, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote to the States that theirs had been only a boy and girl affair.

The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out on to a rosy-coloured porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.