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| Not the edition I read, but it's my favorite cover! |
Well, what can I say: Baz's movie's debut last year naturally prompted me to read the book before the film hit theaters. For only a second time, in fact. I liked it more this time, but I do have to admit to not exactly enjoying the book. The characters are flawed and there aren't many redeeming qualities in any of them. And the story sort of goes on... then ends. Just like that. A little tragic, but it doesn't necessarily feel like a fitting, nicely wrapped ending.
That being said, it's a Fitzgerald book. For me the book is never about the story (or lack of one) being told, but the writing and the depiction of a fascinating period of time. Mostly, it's the writing. I love how he says things. Below, you'll find the text I highlighted. That brilliant writing and some of my random musings.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me
some advice that I’ve been running over in my mind ever since. (1)
Perhaps among the most famous opening lines of literature.
Perhaps among the most famous opening lines of literature.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves
growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar
conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. (4)
…one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence
at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax. (6)
They had spent a year in France for no particular reason,
and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and
were rich together. (6)
I love this idea of being rich as a thing to do
I love this idea of being rich as a thing to do
And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can
be in this world, a beautiful little fool. (17)
Oh, Daisy
Oh, Daisy
This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow
like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys
and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move
dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. (23)
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which
drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J.
Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their
retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair
of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. (23)
Don't those eyes sure get a lot of attention when the book is taught
Don't those eyes sure get a lot of attention when the book is taught
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and
repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. (35)
Totally, bro, I feel ya
Totally, bro, I feel ya
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths
among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. (39)
I believe that one the first night I went to Gatsby’s house
I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. (41)
… I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the
only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking
purposeless and alone. (42)
Quite true about my social life in 2014, not just that gilded age
Quite true about my social life in 2014, not just that gilded age
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal
reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It
faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then
concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. (48)
Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties
were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theater district, I felt
a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and
voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes
outlined unintelligible inside. (57)
But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act
as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely
out of that tangle back home. (58)
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
(136)
…and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her
life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick dark blood
with the dust. (137)
I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I
took her to the window’—with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window
and leaned with his face pressed against it—“and I said ‘God knows what you’ve
been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool
God!” (159)
Outside the window was the Doctor's eyes! Gasp! Is he God?
Outside the window was the Doctor's eyes! Gasp! Is he God?
Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I
turned away. (177)
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past. (180)
