Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Reading people like books with poetic insight and psychological precision, Fitzgerald became a veritable Shakespeare of the modern era. Using analogies that spark insight and illuminate the depth of feeling just below the surface of the words, this book transcends its story. For example, his phrase, "looking as cheerful as Christmas." The words don't just describe but also evoke long held, personal and deep emotions. A story about change and resistance to change, it explores the inequality of gender relations, the rich vs. the poor, and the dark underbelly of the American Dream.

Like most world-changing ideas and works of art, it took time for The Great Gatsb to be appreciated. Only 3000 copies were printed for the second edition in 1925 and many unsold copies were still in the publisher's warehouse when Fitzgerald died 15 years later. His last royal statement listed only 7 copies sold during the first half of 1940. The book didn't become popular until the late 1950's, more than 15 years after Fitzgerald died. At that point, according to biographer Matthew Joseph Bruccoli, "the novel became the most widely read, translated, admired, imitated, and studied 20th century work of American fiction."

Quotes from Great Gatsby

“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

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“appalled by the raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms, and by the too obtrusive fate that heeded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing, she saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.”

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“as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island—a fresh green breast of the new world... vanished trees [that] had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams... for a transitory enchanted moment many must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor denied”

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“Daisy began to sing... bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again.”

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“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning—”

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Themes: Shambhala

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“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. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.”

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Themes: Sex

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“Her voice was full of money... that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it... the king's daughter, the golden girl”

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Themes: Money

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“his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.. For awhile 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.”

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“I am slow thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires... Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine”

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“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

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“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 understood you just so 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.”

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“One thing's sure and nothing's surer
The rich get richer and the poor get—children”

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Themes: Family

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

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Quotes about Great Gatsby (3 quotes)

“I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: 'I've found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.'”

F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896 – 1940 CE
Prototype of "Jazz Age" exuberance

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The Great Gatsby does not proclaim the nobility of the human spirit; it is not politically correct; it does not reveal how to solve the problems of life; it delivers no fashionable or comforting messages. It is just a masterpiece.”

Matthew J. Bruccoli 1931 – 2008 CE

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“[The Great Gatsby—] a story of class warfare in a nation that denies it even has a class system, in which the game is eternally rigged for the rich to win.”

Winston Churchill 1874 – 1965 CE

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