I have just spent 5 hours with a student writing a term paper on The Great Gatsby. I love this book and admire F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ability to turn a wonderful phrase. I muttered as we were writing down quotes from the book, “I would kill to write a sentence like this.” I thought I would share a few of these glorious sentences to illustrate Fitzgerald’s deftness with the written word. Here are a few for your enjoyment.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
“This is a valley of ashes–a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.”
“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
I love these words and this author and this story. Rich, full, tragic and powerful.
On that note, I’ll say good-night. Sleep well, my friends.
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