The Great Gatsby

I don't really know what exactly to say about this book, that's why I'll let it speak for itself. All I'll say is that I like it very much:

Quotes from the book:

• "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

• "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."

• "Civilization's going to pieces. I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things... The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be--will be utterly submerged... It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things."

• "All right... 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 little fool."

• "a single green light, minute and faraway, that might have been the end of a dock."

• "He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive."

• "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."

• "I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library."

• "It takes two to make an accident."

• "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."

• "If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay... You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock."

• "One thing's sure and nothing's surer/ The rich get richer and the poor get - children./ In the meantime,/ In between time--"

• "There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion."

• "He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was."

• "Can't repeat the past?... Why of course you can!"

• "the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age..."

• "It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy--it increased her value in his eyes."

• "God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!"

• "He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream."

• "He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and splendor of the hall... his grief began to be mixed with an awed pride."

• "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

• "And as I sat there, brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out Daisy's light at the end of his dock. He had come such a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."

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