The Great Gatsby

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  2019-04-22
  Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat 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.And as I sat there brooding on t...
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  2019-04-22
  Rise from bed..................................................6.00 A.M.
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  2019-04-21
  The track curved and now it was going away from the sun, which, as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.
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  2019-03-10
  Daisy put her arm through his abruptly,but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said.Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever.Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock.His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
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  2019-02-17
  I began to like New York ,the racy,adventurous feel of it at night ,and the satisfiction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives,and no one would ever know or disapprove.Sometimes in my mind,I followed them to their apartments on the corner of hidden streets,and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness.At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes ,and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary resturant dinner—young clerks in the dusk,wasting the most poignant ...
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  2019-02-08
  he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way ,and,far as I was from ,I could have sworn he was trembling .Involuntarily I glanced seaward ——and distingguished nothing except a single green light ,mimute and far away,that might have been the end of a dock.When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
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  2019-02-08
  The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored ballon.They were both in white ,and their dressses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house .I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall .Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room ,and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.
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  2019-02-10
  I wanted to get out and walk southward towardthe park through the soft twilight,but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pullled me back ,as if with propes,into my chair .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 ,simulaaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.