The Great Gatsby

"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." 这句话真的值得回味，我要不断提醒自己去切身理解这之间的含义。

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

Then wear the golden hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry, lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you! Whenever you feel like criticsing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had. for the intimate revlations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. TReserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. If personality is an unbroken series of successful 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. 5- life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. 6-one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty one that everything afterwards savours of anticlimax. the lawn started at the beach and ran towards the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens- finally when it reached the house drfting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. 8-I've heard it said that daisy's murmur was only to make people lean towards her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming. it was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arragement of notes that will never be played again. ... sing 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. 10- They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening, too, would be over and casually put away. it was sharply different from the west, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase towards its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself. 11- the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dust. 32- rare smiiles with a quality of eternal reassurance it it, that you may come across four or five times in life. I faced- or seemed to face- the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understtod you just as far as you wanted to be understoood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisedly the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. ...a dim background stated to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away. 38- most affectations conceal sth eventually, even though they don't in the beginning. Thy'll keep out of my way. it takes two to make an accident. suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself. Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal vrtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that i have ever known. 41- Terraced with a labyrinth of wind shields that mirrored a dozen suns. I began the generalised evasions which that question deserves. 50- Perhaps because she doesn't drink. It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. you can hold your tongue, and moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care. He cam alive to me, delived suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour. ....He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths- so that he could come over some afternoon to a strager's garden. ... there are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired. 54- The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, before any words came through. 59- He hadn't once ceased looking at daisy, and i think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well loved eyes. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at ther presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waite with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock. 61- one thing's sure and nothing's surer. the rich get richer and the poor get-- children. In the meantime, In between time- 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 can store up in his ghostly heart. - I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed- that voice was a deathless song. 63- The truth was that jay gatsby of west egg, long island, sprang from his platonic conception of himself. he was a son of god- a phrase which , if it means anything, means just that - and he must be about his father' s business, the sevice of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. so he invente just the sort of jay gatsby that a seven teen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. - for a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing. 67- Or perhaps i had merely grown used to it, grown to accept west egg as a world complete in itself, with its own stadards and its own great figures , second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being so, and now i was looking at it again, through daisy's eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment. -these things excite me so, if you want to kiss me any time during the evening, nick, just let me know and ill be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. 71- He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of god. ... at his lips' tough she blossomd for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. ... what i had almost remembered was uncommunicable for ever. 73- Daisy and jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans. 75- Life stars all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. 76- I was full of money- that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbal's song of it... High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl... 85- The words seemed to bite physically into gatsby. 86- but with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, towards that lost voice across the room. - Thiry- the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm , thinning hair. 95- GATSBY was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor. 114- They were careless people, tom and daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. 115- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. ... 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. ...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. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. It was a body capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body. 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. Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch, open towards the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind. There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. 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. I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone — he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.