F. Scott Fitzgerald & Great Prose

The Great Gatsby

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal 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.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“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, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

This brief passage is so eminently relatable to anyone who has ever been lonely or smitten or desired something. It’s easy to build a thing up until it becomes greater in your mind than it could ever hope to be in real life, and I imagine most of us have fallen victim to it at some time or another. Fitzgerald nails it.

This Side of Paradise

“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

This isn’t particularly insightful so much as clever and simply put. The right kind of attitude for the right kind of person. It gives you great insight into the mind of the speaker and it does it in very few words.

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”

This sentiment is at the core of so much of what Fitzgerald wrote. Always striving but never arriving. Never satisfied.