Rereading The Great Gatsby

I'm always jealous when someone gets to read a great book for the first time, anticipating the marvelous journey of discovery that they will go through that I've already taken, but rereading The Great Gatsby again after over ten years reminds me that rediscovering the familiar is a pleasure in its own right.

F. Scott Fitzgerald has so many great descriptions in this story and here are some of my favorite lines:

"Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope." (1)

"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life....This responsiveness ...was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person...." (2)

"It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or fives 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." (48)

"His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one." (94)

"No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart." (97)

'"They're a rotten crowd," I shouted. "You're worth the whole damn lot of them."' (154)

"Its vanished trees...had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; 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." (182)

"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" (182)