Chapter I
Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope
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. That was a way she had
Daisy – Well, I’ve had a very bad time, Nick, and I’m pretty cynical about everything
Daisy – And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best things a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool
Daisy – You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow. Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. Sophisticated—God I’m so sophisticated!
Chapter II
Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life
Chapter III
the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names
Lucille – I never care what I do, so I always have a good time
He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. I was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. I faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believe in you as you would like to be believed in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you than, at your best, you hoped to convey
during the course of her song she had decided ineptly that everything was very very sad—she was not only singing, she was weeping too
The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something—most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning
Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever shrewd men and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to enduring being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body
Jordan – I am careful.
Nick – No, you’re not.
Jordan – Well, other people are
Jordan – It takes two to make an accident.
Nick – Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.
Jordan – I hope I never will. I hate careless people
Chapter V
He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock
As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart
Chapter VI
I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn’t been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy’s eyes
It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things which you have expended your own powers of adjustment
It occurred to me that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and kiss at her cheek.
Daisy – I like her. I think she’s lovely.
Nick – but the rest offended her—and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion
She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand
Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that had never before and would never have again
I was reminding of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though here was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever
Chapter VII
But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself
Chapter IX
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made
THE GREAT GATSBY: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4671.The_Great_Gatsby
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