The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald


For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake
Superior as a clam digger and a salmon fisher or in any other capacity that
brought him food and bed.  His brown, hardening body lived naturally through
the half fierce, half lazy work of the bracing days.  He knew women early and
since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because
they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things
which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.

	-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place" that Broadway had
begotten upon a Long Island fishing village – appalled by its raw vigor that
chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its
inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing.  She saw something awful
in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

	-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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Human sympathy has its limits and we were content to let all their tragic
arguments fade with the city lights behind.  Thirty – the promise of a decade
of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of
enthusiasm, thinning hair.  But there was Jordan beside me who, unlike Daisy,
was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.  As we passed
over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and
the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her
hand.

	-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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When they met again two days later it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was
somehow betrayed.  Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine;
the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he
kissed her curious and lovely mouth.  She had caught a cold and it made her
voice huskier and more charming than ever and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware
of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness
of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the
hot struggles of the poor.

	-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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No telephone message arrived but the butler went without his sleep and waited
for it until four o'clock – until long after there was anyone to give it to if
he came.  I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come and
perhaps he no longer cared.  If that was true he must have felt that he had
lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single
dream.  He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves
and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the
sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.  A new world, material without
being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously
about ... like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the
amorphous trees.

	-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after
he is dead," he suggested.  "After that my own rule is to let everything
alone."

	-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.  Most of the
big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the
shadowy, moving glow of a ferry boat across the Sound.  And as the moon rose
higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware
of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes – a fresh,
green breast of the new world.  Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way
for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of
all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his
breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic
contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time
in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

	-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby