Another reread. This is perhaps my favorite American book. This time, i was impressed by the symbolism of eyes (probably inspired by the cover).
Quotes:
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.
“Who is he?” I demanded. “Do you know?” “He’s just a man named Gatsby.”
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs
is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction.
“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—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… .
for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
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.
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