“‘Her voice is full of money,' he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…”
“‘Anyhow he gives large parties,’ said Jordan, changing the subject with an urbane distaste for the concrete. ‘And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.’”
“However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time.”
“I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment but he was already too far away and I could only remember, without resentment, that Daisy hadn't sent a message or a flower. Dimly I heard someone murmur 'Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on,' and then the owl-eyed man said 'Amen to that,' in a brave voice.”
“The ‘death car’ as the newspapers called it, didn’t stop; it came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment and then disappeared around the next bend.”
“Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed. 'Come to lunch some day,' he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator. 'Where?' 'Anywhere?' 'Keep your hands off the lever,' snapped the elevator boy. 'I beg your pardon,' said Mr. McKee with dignity, 'I didn’t know I was touching it.' 'All right,' I agreed. 'I’ll be glad to.'…I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands. 'Beauty and the Beast…Loneliness…Old Grocery Horse…Brook’n Bridge…' Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for the four o’clock train.”
“After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.”
“I lived at West Egg, the - well the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them.”
