deviousone on 2004-02-04 at 10:01 p.m.
Great Gatsby +some


Favourite Parts from The Great Gatsby
  • pg 21: " 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool-- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful fool'
    'You see I think everything's terrible anyhow,' she went on in a convinced way. 'Everybody thinks so-- the most advanced poeple. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.' Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. 'Sophisticated-- God, I'm sophisticated!'
    The instant her voiced broke off, ceasing to compell my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as thought the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributary emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged."

  • pg 40: "I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening steets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible cariety of life."

  • pg 45: "I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited-- they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission."

  • pg 52: "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 your life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then it concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. 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. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care."

    fucking AMAZING. Please please please read this book. He has Hawthornes style, minus the 10 pages describing the splinter on the door of the house on the point of the scaffold where Hester stood to be humiliated.

    (i'm going to Davis next weekend for sure...who wants to come w/me?!)

    back & forth