I found in my notebook, written in a hurried, ugly handwriting, pieces from the book The Great Gatsby. I read them and found it interesting that I had thought them important, meaningful enough to write them down and see how applicable they are to my life right now. Life is funny....you can find it in books, in pictures, everywhere...you belong everywhere!
"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away." p. 2
"Yet high over the city our life of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the causal watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life." p.44
"He smiled understandingly, - much more than understandingly. 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. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished - and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd." p.53-54, this was the first description of gatsby.
"And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties, there isn't any privacy". Jordan Baker says to Nick.
"At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others - poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner - young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life." p.60
"Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry." p.84
"No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."p.90
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...And one fine morning - So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." End
