Quoting the Great Fitzgerald

I just recently finished reading 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott. Fitzgerald and this was a read I thoroughly enjoyed, start to finish. For many reasons, this makes the list of books I'd recommend. [Not that I'm particularly fit to recommend because I'm definitely not the most seasoned reader around! But, I know what I like. And since I consider myself the average, ordinary, every-day book lover, I'm OK to recommend, I think! :)] so yeah! All that and, it happens to be considered one of the greatest American novels. Amongst those reasons are the fact that the story is pretty well drawn out, maybe a little too coincidental but it keeps you gripped all the same, the characters are very interestingly thought of and portrayed and above all, the English this book is written in is divine! A total treat to anyone who prefers calling a serviette a serviette, if you know what I mean. You probably don't [unless you've hung around me often enough]; but I'm not here to do a book review.
As I went through the story, I came across a whole lot of sentences or quotes or random statements or call-them-what-you-wills that Fitzgerald, I thought, did extremely well to concoct. The ease with which he creatively explains different circumstances and emotions his characters experience with immaculate articulate clarity had me wishing I could think straight enough to write like that someday. So, I felt the need to have these lines that meant something the moment I read them all in one place and so in my usual fashion, I made a list- a list of the ones I loved. Let them mean what they will to you! Here goes...


1] "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 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."


2] "I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' this isn't just an epigram- life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all."


3] "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."


4] "Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."


5] "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year....Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."


6] "It takes two to make an accident."


7] "Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."


8] "It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment."


9] "Can't repeat the past?…Why of course you can!"


10] "There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind"


11] "Let us learn to show friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead."


12] "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…And one fine morning-"


13] "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."