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 for him like a flower and the in-carnation was complete

Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an in-visible glass

o he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end

is parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm peo-ple—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all.

James Gatz

Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muf-fled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.

‘I’m sorry about the clock,’

As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.

If he left the room for a minute she’d look around uneasily and say ‘Where’s Tom gone?’ and wear the most abstract-ed expression until she saw him coming in the door.

Next day at five o’clock she married Tom Buchan-an without so much as a shiver and started off on a three months’ trip to the South Seas.

He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient open-ing and closing of a hand

Taking a white card from his wallet he waved it before the man’s eyes.‘Right you are,’ agreed the policeman, tipping his cap. ‘Know you next time, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse ME!

From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick

He smiled understandingly—much more than under-standingly. 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 ex-ternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so 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. Precisely at that point it van-ished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.

n his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the cham-pagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cat-aracts of foam.

Making a short deft movement Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand

It’s just a crazy old thing,’ she said. ‘I just slip it on some-times when I don’t care what I look like.’

there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.

his is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen-dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your

“the history and culture of our great country” raises numerous questions, among them: Who is encompassed in that “our”