ginsudo

the way of ginsu

personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures

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p. 6:

personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures

A great example of distilling the essence of a complex human notion into a handful of words. What is personality, what does it mean, how is it understood and displayed and hidden? Fitzgerald defines it in five words, a beautiful turn of phrase.

This page is just crushingly full of other candidates -

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
“a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth”
“I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”
“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.”
“what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams”

Any one of these would have been the jewel of a million other books, but this is just on the second page!

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Written by ginsu

14 Nov 2007 at 21:16

Posted in Gatsby Project

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  1. [...] as I suppose I was at that age, forgetting about the beauty in Fitzgerald’s descriptions. No one sets an emotional scene like F. Scott Fitzgerald. No one. But awakening that in a 16 year-old mind is rather a task and I fear that nothing really [...]


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