Things I Didn't Write: "The Great Gatsby"

It is nearly impossible for me to read a book without a pencil in my hand.  If it's for schoolwork, it's to highlight the things that are important and make notes in the margins...but even when I read for fun, I'll often take a pencil and underline certain passages that strike me in some fashion.  I think it's a writer thing.

Over the past couple weeks I've been reading The Great Gatsby...really, I've been rereading it, but as the last time I read it was nine years ago in the 9th grade, when I was 14, I don't think that truly counts.  I remember vaguely liking the book then, but I've appreciated it much, much more reading it now.  I still have a chapter to go before I finish, but here are some of the passages that have gained pencil marks as I've been reading...

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 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.

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

"You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock."  Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said.  Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever.  Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her.  It had seemed as close as a star to the moon.  Now it was again a green light on a dock.  His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all.  The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself...So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

And there you have it: some things that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.  Now I'm off to finish the book...