But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.
He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.
Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
He knew women early and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of others because they were hysterical about the things that in his overwhelming self absorption he took for granted.
Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where divergence from a code would be thought dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty boduy.
It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply — I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.
He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American — that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth, and even more, with the formless grace of our nervous sporadic games.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.