F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925- 89 years ago today! It’s one of my favorite books and had me entranced with New York City long before I moved here. In honor of its birthday, I gathered some of my favorite quotes from the novel.

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

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. 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 faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as 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.”

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

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

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

“There are all types of love in this world, but never the same love twice.”

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”