"Her expression was curiously familiar — it was an expression I had often seen on women’s faces...

"... but on Myrtle Wilson’s face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were ...

"A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags..."

"... twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it...

"He lit Daisy’s cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across the room..."

"... where there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall." Today's sentence, in the Gatsby project ...

"There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic."

There are different minds and different confusions, and perhaps each is unlike every other. That possibility is not excluded by the assertio...

"I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee."

It means something that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "pig" instead of "pork." I think about how George Harrison sang abou...

"That's how you laughed in the middle of the night."

Said Meade, and I said: "Then Chip Ahoy must have been in my dream." Because I was just reading his comment: "Melody and Rose...

"When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air."

Today's Gatsby sentence , describing singing, has us picturing the woman as a vessel containing warm human magic . Because she's a c...

"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 won...

"A breeze stirred the gray haze of Daisy’s fur collar."

Very little going on in the action here. A tiny wind creates a bit of motion in a small subsection of the lady's clothing. But poeticall...

"Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say..."

"... anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that n...

"I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife."

I wonder if "the latest thing" was a new expression back in 1922 when F. Scott Fitzgerald started writing "The Great Gatsby....

"Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes."

The most interesting thing about today's "Gatsby" sentence is the use of plunged for the action of the hands into the pocket...

"There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms up-stairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms..."

"... of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lav...

"After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth ajar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears."

When is a door not a door?/When it's a jar . That was my favorite childhood riddle, evoked by today's Gatsby sentence. There's t...

"The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing."

The Waste Land ... I think of T.S. Eliot's poem , which was published in 1922. Coincidentally, "The Great Gatsby" — the sourc...

"Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news."

That's from Chapter 6. I'm getting used to these F. Scott Fitzgerald sentences (as I continue with this Gatsby project , taking one...

"They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house."

I decided to pluck something from Chapter 1 for today's entry in the "Great Gatsby" project . I randomly selected the sentenc...

"Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season..."

"... suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chif...

"Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York..."

"... every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves." I warned you I was going to d...

How to read a book a day for a year.

Choose short/easy/audio books. Actually, I read a book a day and have for years — but it's an audiobook, and most of this reading is don...