I've read "The Great Gatsby" five or more times (yes, I am a literature nerd), and I am always amazed at the quality of Fitzgerald's narrative. He has this incredible way of writing poetic prose -- beautifully crafted strands of carefully selected words that mesh magically with one another to further both the plot and his characterization of the novel's main actors. He is truly an artist -- so much so that I find myself getting goosebumps whenever I pick up a copy of "Gatsby" and give it a read. During my most recent perusal, I highlighted a number of my most favorite quotations. See if they give you goosebumps, too.
1. “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 eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as 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.”
2. “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
3. “The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.”
4. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
5.“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
6. “People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.”
7. “I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool..."
8. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic 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… "
9. “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
10. “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
11. “They were careless people...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...”
