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21 " 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! "
― Nghi Vo , The Chosen and the Beautiful
22 " 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. "
23 " The sky went a flat aluminum gray with sullen purple highlights, a warning of danger. "
24 " Back in Louisville, that high wet smell coupled with the uncomfortable prickling heat meant that a twister was on the way, crossing the flat cropland with a destructive fury that was out to ruin lives. We were in the East, however, and we had other ways to ruin our lives. "
25 " Under the wrack and wreck of what had come before, the sky was new, and I reached for it with a yearning eager hand. "
26 " We followed his arm to where Anna Farnsworth languished beneath the ghostly lights, the illumination giving her a flickering phosphor tint. She had just appeared in The Girl on the Strand, utterly scandalous. It was common tat around New York that an old wizard had made her from a whole garden’s worth of peonies. He should have made her out of something more sturdy, because she was looking wilted under the August heat. "
27 " 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. "
28 " For him, as in the hallowed halls of the elite from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, there would always be a human price for his luxury. Otherwise, I could see him musing, what was the point? "
29 " I wasn't really interested in making a go of it with anyone, no matter what Tom and Daisy were pushing, but part of that disinterest came from the place of a rather arrogant person realizing that she couldn't. There was nothing as uninteresting as something I couldn't have. "
30 " Like they have anything in common besides having two legs, "
31 " Someone had tied her big toes together with string, a tradition in the East to keep a corpse from walking. "
32 " the Sound rose up in delicate white foam blooms, the water choppier than it had been. "