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!

p. 5:

I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

What I love foremost about Fitzgerald’s writing is his unaccountable ability to turn a gorgeous phrase, the way he can string words together in unexpected ways to make a perfect description that you didn’t know could exist before you saw it but you can’t forget once you have. But this is an example of another of his characteristic gifts, his ability to see into the hearts of men, their beliefs about themselves which they use for cover and justification.

Ironically, this is Nick’s first judgment in the book, his explanation for why he’s an observer, merely a repository for the secrets of wilder men. It’s a disclaimer and excuse but not an abdication of his moral core, because it’s also an implicit promise to pass judgment at the end. He reserves judgment but it’s going to come eventually, and all along the way he pitilessly collects the incidents and details that will inform his opinion.

All right, here’s how I’m going to start out on this blog. Every post will be about a single page of The Great Gatsby, and will discuss my favorite phrase or sentence on that page, as little as two words but not longer than an entire sentence. If the page is especially chock full o’ goodness, I may discuss alternatives, but I’ll still pick a favorite.

I’ll be working from the paperback First Collier Books Edition, 1992. The text of the novel runs from page 5 to 189.