"The Great Gatsby"

[fiefoe]

Who can say when's the right time to pick up a certain book? There it was on the shelf, looking slim and clean and with a "Summer" sticker around its spine. So, why not? And then there was the first chapter, more absorbing than I'd thought possible for any 'classic', and the deal was sealed. 

Tom as a type was almost instantly recognizable.
__ men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax
__ a body capable of enormous leverage
__ as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.
__ Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

It's hard to imagine Mia Farrow as Daisy.

• Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it.
• "...Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it."
• She turned to me helplessly: "What do people plan?" <> Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.
• a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire.... They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening, too, would be over and casually put away.
  

'an elegant young roughneck'

• It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, .. it faced.. 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...
• delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor
• "In any case", he said, "it was just impersonal." <> What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in his conception of the affair that couldn't be measured?
• those who guessed at his corruption - and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream..