The Chosen and the Beautiful

The night before her wedding, Daisy taught me that after the world ended, you still had to get up in the morning, and the things that you ruined would still be there, needing to be fixed. When I looked at famous Jay Gatsby, soul gone and some terrible engine he called love driving him now, I could see that for him, the world was always ending. For him, it was all a wreck and a ruin, and he had no idea why the rest of us weren't screaming.

There are women who will forgive a great deal for a moment of kindness from a handsome man, but Daisy and the other older girls who had taken me under their wings had taught me not to be one of them.

When I looked at famous Jay Gatsby, soul gone and some terrible engine he called love driving him now, I could see that for him, the world was always ending. For him, it was all a wreck and a ruin, and he had no idea why the rest of us weren’t screaming.

He wanted something agreeable, something sweeter around the edges, but I was never very good at sweet.

Yes,” I sighed. Sometimes, the only excuse for doing something stupid is knowing that you are doing it and being willing to accept the consequences.

Men had no idea how careless the women of their set weren't allowed to be.

It was after midnight with that tired charm that all parties on the downturn acquire.

He called me careless because he didn't have the words to sort out how jealous he was of my money and my freedom and how very few people in the world could act as I did.

The wind came into the house from the Sound, and it blew Daisy and me around her East Egg mansion like puffs of dandelion seeds, like foam, like a pair of young women in white dresses who had no cares to weigh them down.

We don’t have to do anything. We can just wait for fall. Life starts over again in fall.

Aunt Justine once gave me some advice when I was newly come to New York. If I was going to be passing anything more than time in public with a man, I should always find out what happened when he heard no, whether it was from me, a taxi driver, a waiter, or his employer. “You may decide what to do after that,” she said, “but most times, your course of action will be clear.

When you can't fix a thing, the best course of action can be to ruin it all so that no one can see what truly happened." Nick laughed, and I wondered if that was what love was, making someone forget the pain that gnawed at them and would not stop.

There was a heat to her that put the day to shame, as if she were burning up with fever from within.

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

When you’re alone so much, realizing that you’re not is terribly upsetting.

He liked being shocked by the extravagances of the city, but he was not ready for the people that came with the wonder, who lived shoulder to shoulder with wonder and thus grew immune to it.

Down among the ashes, their faces and hands turned gray and grimy with the refuse of New York, I could see the men who lived and worked in the ash. It was their lot to shovel the ash that came in. It was a titanic struggle that I imagined they could only cope with by realizing that they were after an impossible goal and therefore were free to ignore it.

she needed to talk like other people needed to eat or to breathe. At some point, she realized that it didn’t matter at all what she said, and so she turned into a bubble of fashionable bon mots, non sequiturs, and giddy dizzy excitement.

Death doesn’t come to Gatsby’s” went the rumor, and it might even have been true. Certainly ugliness didn’t, and neither did morning or hangovers or hungers that could not be sated. Those things waited for us outside the gates, so whoever wanted to go home?

At Gatsby’s, the clock stood at just five shy of midnight the moment you arrived. Crossing from the main road through the gates of his world, a chill swirled around you, the stars came out, and a moon rose up out of the Sound. It was as round as a golden coin, and so close you could bite it. I had never seen a moon like that before. It was no Mercury dime New York moon, but a harvest moon brought all the way from the wheat fields of North Dakota to shine with sweet benevolence down on the chosen and the beautiful.

I imagined their lungs were protected in their youth by keeping their mouths shut tight. Then as they grew older themselves, more prone to voice their opinions, more eager to make sure that the world did not go one second longer without their words than it absolutely had to, the ash won over, sliding over their skin and then into their open mouths.

You weren't meant to look at people the way that Lieutenant Gatsby looked at Daisy Fay. You couldn't peel your skin back and show them how your heart had gone up in flames, how nothing that had come before mattered and nothing that came afterward mattered as long as you had what you wanted. In that one still moment, it was as if Daisy had, all unknowing, taken Jay Gatsby's heart for her own, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to get it back.

I had never seen a moon like that before. It was no Mercury dime New York moon, but a harvest moon brought all the way from the wheat fields of North Dakota to shine with sweet benevolence down on the chosen and the beautiful.

I spared him the trouble of coming up with a reason to talk to me, instead plucking the drink from his hand. It was a bijou, vermouth and gin flavored with absinthe; a strange choice for Nick if it was a choice he had made at all.

Under the wrack and wreck of what had come before, the sky was new, and I reached for it with a yearning eager hand.

Did you keep it?” I asked. I wouldn’t have been so sanguine about taking gifts from someone like Gatsby, but she gave me an indignant look. Things were different where she came from, apparently, or perhaps she wasn’t so very bright. “Two hundred and sixty-five dollars, gas blue with lavender beads? Of course I did!

it was like being set adrift in a sea where I couldn’t drown, where all the monsters lurking in the depths rather liked me and wouldn’t upset my little craft.

The sky went a flat aluminum gray with sullen purple highlights, a warning of danger.

Summer in New York goes by slowly until it goes by fast,

Some of those girls had babies inside them, and others had broken hearts or broken heads, but they fed the Mississippi all the same, and I had no interest in being one of them.