"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chapter 1

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.

Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit.

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.

No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man."

We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face.

Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.

A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear.

I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind.

I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach.