personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures
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!











[...] 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 [...]
markstorer.com » Blog Archive » An unsuccessful series of gestures
3 Mar 2008 at 21:05