p. 22:

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said.

We’ve all met someone like this, someone who is so compelling, convincing, captivating in person.  In a one-on-one conversation, these people exude a magic circle of belief – they are not exactly deceiving you, but they create their own limited reality with the force of their personality.  And then they turn it off, like a switch, you turn away, the world comes seeping into the circle and you realize the basic insincerity of that temporary reality.

p. 21:

‘And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’

Now this is interesting. Daisy said this – or says she said this – at the birth of her nameless little girl. It’s kind of a proto-feminist’s lament, that society is rigged to limit any meaningful goals for women, so they’re reduced to having their happiness depend on men, who are destined to disappoint them. So the best thing is to be beautiful enough to attract the best man, and foolish enough to be blissfully ignorant of his failings.

Daisy says it to Nick, and maybe she means it, but what she really revels in is the cynical sophistication of her saying it. She doesn’t care about women’s rights, she barely cares about her daughter in this moment – what she cares about is her trying on this attitude like this season’s latest fashion.

p:18:

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.

This simile – the sunlight leaving her face like children from a street at dusk – is one of the phrases that made me want to write this blog. I keep using the words “beautiful,” “lovely,” “gorgeous” because my vocabulary is so thin, I have no power over language like this man. This simile is all that, well beyond what my simple words can describe. Along with the clear romanticism and tribute to beauty, for this modern reader there’s a paean to lost childhood – do kids really play on the street anymore, running for home as their mothers call out their names in the twilight?

And that whole sentence, I just noticed now, is actually a metaphor for an entire love affair, an entire life of a beautiful woman. There’s this shallow trend now towards flash fiction – it’s hard to sustain bursts of imagery like this over an entire novel, so people try it in paragraphs and pages. But this one sentence shames many of those efforts.

My distant second choice for this page is the way Miss Baker chats about California and “Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.” Brilliant observation that body language interrupts as much as the spoken word.