‘the Great Gatsby’ - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“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. There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air.” page 10

“it was Gatsby’s mansion. Or rather, as I didnt know Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by someone of that name.” page 11

“‘I’m p-paralyzed with happiness’” Daisy, page 15

“her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.” page 15-6

“he took his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of his glass.” page 17

“Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as if he were moving a checker to another square.” pages 17-18

“Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire.” page 18

“They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.” page 19  

“‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool- that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’” Daisy, page 24

“”In fact I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of -oh- fling you together. You know- lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing-” Daisy, page 25

“regarding the silver pepper of stars… Something in his leisurely movements… suggested… himself, come out to decide what was his share of our local heavens” page 25

“hard dog-biscuits- one of which decomposed apathetically in a saucer of milk all afternoon” page 35

“‘All I kept thinking about, over and over, was “You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.”’” Myrtle, page 42

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It 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. It 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 as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” page 54

“‘I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.’” Jordan, page 56

“The tears coursed down her cheeks — not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets.” page 37

“‘It was — simply amazing,’ she repeated abstractedly. ‘But I swore I wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.’” Jordan, page 59

“‘I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.’” Jordan, page 65

“Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.” page 65

“He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before.” page 71

“‘Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.’” Gatsby, page 72

“‘You sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies and your-’ He supplied an imaginary noun with another wave of his hand.” page 79

“It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal scepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.” page 86

“I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs” page 87

“He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.” page 98

“For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there 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.” page 118

“‘Don’t be morbid… life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.’” Jordan, page 124

“‘We’re getting old… If we were young we’d rise and dance.’” Daisy, page 134

“He was clutching at some lost hope and I couldn’t bear to set him free.” page 154

“his eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears” page 174

“‘Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead’” Wolfshiem, page 179

“They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” page 186

“his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” page 188

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter-tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning -  So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” page 188