Status Updates From Careless People: Murder, Ma...

"The accidental is all that we are left with once we have lost our illusions."

"Someone was going to have to improve the story, to lie better than the truth."

"The problem with unreliable narrators is that sometimes they tell the truth - it's just difficult to know when."

"Sometimes this technique is described as fiction."

😂

"Gatsby has no friends - just uninvited guests."

"This begs a question about what defines normal people, or everyday life: unlike fiction, reality has no obligation to be realistic."

"Being imported wholesale into a work of fiction would give anyone a scare."

"Although Hamborszky's statement was hearsay, vague, and did not actually deal with the crime, and thus could not be put before the grand jury, 'the authorities did not consider this a fatal defect'"

Well that's ok then...

"Possibly the first and last instance of 'furtive spooning' being cited as a motive for murder."

“I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos"
- Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

"Nick has certainly become one of literature's better-known unreliable narrators ... Nick is a romantic in the Keatsian sense: he thinks untold stories are lovelier."

Even Fitz loves the pig lady!

Mrs Gibson "wouldn't be the only unreliable narrator in the story." So annoying when your neighbour disputes your location "at the hour the pig-raising Amazon says she was astride her mule watching the double killing."

Pig-raising Amazon is my new fav epithet

"The Truth - an absolute concern in theory, yet so intricate and extensive as to be comprehended by no one." - The New York Tribune, 6 Aug 1922

"We do love the centre of things. You feel the motion so much less." - Zelda Fitzgerald

"Old words burn through stories like new gold."

"It is worth listening for the music in the very heart of the noise."

"I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again" - F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City

"Books kept leading women astray, it seemed."

"It was customary to give two dollars to the cabdriver if you threw up in his cab."

Was more alcohol consumed during Prohibition than at any other time in history?

I think Dr Long was drunk, everyone else is

"He had two corpses with bullets in their heads. What did it matter how many bullets? They had been shot in the head and they were both dead."

Ah yes, death by being dead

"The Great Gatsby emerges from a world strewn with wreckage and that debris is the novel's material - sullied, but with the hope of something redeemable glinting among the ash heaps."

"American advertising created dreams of infinite possibilty, promising mail-order art and snake-oil beauty" - Zelda Fitzgerald

"Anyone who wanted to be cool was talking about sex."

"Even such small historical symmetries can suggest there are patterns all around us, reminders of how expansive the possibilities truly are."