The Great Gatsby Chapter 2 Quotes

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited.

There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights.

This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

It takes two to make an accident.

He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in and never told me about it.

She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume sometime before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room.

So I sat down discreetly in the living-room and read a chapter of Simon called Peter—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things, because it didn’t make any sense to me.

It’s a lot of fun to have a mint julep with someone you love.

Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with an open hand.

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land.

The people in the cars were gone for the night and the cafes and the places of hot supper were vibrant with reward for virtue.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes.

There was laughter in it, but it was a harsh, clamoring sound that seemed to come from the belly of the car.

You see, I think everything’s terrible anyhow.

He has one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.

You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.

I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon.

The fact was infinitely astonishing to him. And I recognized first the unusual quality of wonder, then the man–itself.

I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then.

It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about things.

He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in and never even told me about it.

Her voice is full of money, he said suddenly.

They’re a rotten crowd, I shouted across the lawn. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.

Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

I’ll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don’t worry; just trust me and I’ll get somebody for you.

And as I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly.

My house looks well, doesn’t it? he demanded. See how the whole front of it catches the light.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.

You cannot make a man forget the past.

You always look so cool, she repeated.

‘Why?’ she exclaimed aloud. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.’

The air is alive with the hum and chatter of the stationed hundreds.

Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.

He was walking ahead of me along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way, his hands out a little from his body as if to fight off interference, his head moving sharply here and there, adapting itself to his restless eyes.

I went back downstairs and I looked at the house that was sparkling in the moonlight and great bursts of music came faintly through the thick walls.

His determination to have my company bordered on violence.

He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.

High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl.

She says they’re just like us.

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

Her murmur was only to make people lean toward her.

The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter.

There is a small pump out on the lawn, and Gatsby’s gardener now leaned against it. looked at me through the gate.

Instead of rambling, this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed itself to the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside.