I’d rather look at all these famous people in – in oblivion.
Finest specimens of human molars.
There were so many places where one might deteriorate pleasantly: Port Said, Shanghai, parts of Turkestan, Constantinople, the South Seas – all lands of sad, haunting music and many odors, where lust could be a mode and expression of life, where the shades of night skies and sunsets would seem to reflect only moods of passion: the colors of lips and poppies.
I don’t mind if they don’t do anything. I don’t see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when anybody does anything.
Gatsby took up his drink. ‘They certainly look cool,’ he said, with visible tension. We drank in long greedy swallows.
I read somewhere that the sun’s getting hotter every year,’ said Tom genially. ‘It seems that pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun – or wait a minute – it’s just the opposite – the sun’s getting colder every year.
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 a 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 upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
There was a slow, pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool, lovely day.
Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay.
Her grey, sun strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her.
He merely slid into the matter through his inability to make definite judgments. He could say “No!” neither to man nor woman; borrower and temptress alike found him tender-minded and pliable. Indeed he seldom made decisions at all, and when he did they were but half-hysterical resolves formed in the panic of some aghast and irreparable awakening.
The particular weakness he indulged on this occasion was his need of excitement and stimulus from without.
It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful.
Unknowingly she saw her own tragedies mirrored in his face.
This was because she knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent, contributing just her share of urbane humor with a precision that approached meagreness. But at the moment when strangers tended to grow uncomfortable in the presence of this economy she would seize the topic and rush off with it, feverishly surprised with herself – then bring it back and relinquish it abruptly, almost timidly, like an obedient retriever, having been adequate and something more.
I’m going to start being that. I don’t like being twenty-two. I hate it more than anything in the world.
She looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.
It occurred to him that all strongly accentuated classes, such as the military, divided men into two kinds: their own kind – and those without.
Twelve scrap books, telling us what wonderful or horrible or mediocre people we were.
For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.