"Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
'They're such beautiful shirts,' she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. 'It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before."(89)
"Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees--he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder."
"He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable vision 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. (106-107)
"You can't repeat the past."
"Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can."
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of the reach of his hand.
"I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She'll see." (106)
Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly.
That was it. I's 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...." (115)
"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now--isn't that enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly. "I did love him once--but I loved you too."(126)
"He was a son of God...and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty." (95)
"He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously - eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand." (141~142)
"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."(142)
"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 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 blured eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever."
"...standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Dr. T.J.Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormouse, from the dissolving night."
"God sees everything," repeated Wilson.
"When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishabley into it.
That's my middle Westㅡnot the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning reains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name."