There are no second acts in American lives.
There was some element of loneliness involved- so easy to be loved- so hard to love.
There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. ‘I know myself,’ he cried, ’but that is all.
She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as someone he knew a long time ago.
Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea.
Yes – well they were having words and she tossed some sand in his face. So naturally he sat on top of her and rubbed her face in the sand. We were – electrified.
There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.
Long ago,” he said, “long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.
The old Metropole,” brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. “Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us at the table, and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it was almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says somebody wants to speak to him outside. ‘All right,’ says Rosy, and begins to get up, and I pulled him down in his chair.
You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.” “I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.” She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
They were together constantly, for lunch, for dinner, and nearly every evening – always in a sort of breathless hush, as if they feared that any minute the spell would break and drop them out of this paradise of rose and flame. But the spell became a trance seemed to increase from day to day.
She was alone with this presence that came out of the North, the dreary loneliness that rose from ice-bound whalers in the Arctic seas, from smokeless, trackless wastes where were strewn the whitened bones of adventure.
And in that instant her eyes were brimming and she was not aware that she was voicing an illusion. Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely – taking almost a delight in the thrust. Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say.
He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American –.
Can’t repeat the past? why of course you can!
There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth – yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams... I know myself, he cried, but that is all.
If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.
Going to take a room at the Commodore, get into a hot bath and open a vein.
The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and, turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone – fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbour’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars.
He wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes.