The Great Gatsby

I took a needed sick day today and finally began reading this masterpiece of literature. Wow. ("Wow" may be one of the only words that , in the right context, can have more power with a period after it than an exclamation mark.) I only read the first chapter, but here's some parts I was in awe of:

-Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.

-If personality is a series of unbroken gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.  This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"-it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

-...so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breathgiving air.

-...one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.  

-...with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall.

-Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

-It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.  Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

-For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face: her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened- then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

-Daisy took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk.

-Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.