chapter 4 quotes Flashcards
speculations about Gatsby…
‘Hes a bootlegger […] One time he killed a man who found out he was nephew to von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey and pour me a last drop into that the crystal glass.’
-condemnationn of Gatsby yet willingness to indulge in his party’s and wealth
the list
‘also, for the crimes and the Backhyssons[…] the young Quinns, divorce now, and Henry L. Pamellto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.’
-facade
-sinister
-modernist style
Gatsby on edge
‘he was never quite still, there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the inpatient opening and closing of a hand.’
Gatsbys car
‘it was a rich cream colour bright with nickel swollen here and there in it’s monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes, and suppeboxes and toolboxes and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a doused Suns.’
-almost sickly in its excess
gatsbys Oxford lie
‘he hurried the phrase ‘educated at Oxford’, or swallowed it or choked on it as if it had bothered him before.’
nicks renewed faith in Gastby
‘then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the grand Canal. I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease with the Crimson-lightened depths the gnawing of his broken heart.’
How Gatsby is above the law
‘I was able to do the commissioner a favour once, he sends me a Christmas card every year.’
the city seen from the…
‘the city seen from the Queensborough bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.’
-American Dream
the limsoine passing
‘As we crossed Blackwells Island, a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negros, two bucks and a girl’
finest specimen…
“finest specimen of human molars” ‘Meyer Wolfsheim? no he’s a gambler,’ Gatsby hesitated, then added Cooley, ‘he’s the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919.”
how Gatsby looked at Daisy
‘the office and Daisy while she was speaking in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.’
the pearls
‘the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars’
-the pears act as a metaphorical leash to being trapped in the marriage.
We gave her spirits of…
‘we gave her spirits of ammonia and put ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress and half an hour later when we walked out the room the pearls were back on her neck and the incident was over.’
Tom ran into a…
‘tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura Road one night and ripped a front wheel of his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers too because her arm was broken- she was one of the chambermaids in Santa Barbara hotel.’
Gatsby coming alive to nick
‘then had not been merely the stars to which he aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.’
