Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix

Gatsby and I may have been nothing to men like Tom Buchanan, but men like that did not know we were as divine as the heavens. We were boys who had created ourselves. We had formed our own bodies, our own lives, from the ribs of the girls we were once assumed to be.

We were boys who had created ourselves. We had formed our own bodies, our own lives, from the ribs of the girls we were once assumed to be.

If you turn yourself into someone everyone can like, you'll probably end up not liking yourself much. If everyone in the world loves you, then really nobody does.

I would have sworn to a priest that Gatsby’s smile pulled light in through the windows

Boys like us get used to having to lie about everything else just so we can tell the truth about ourselves

The rich sons and daughters who drank champagne on his lawn whispered his name as though trying to grasp something, wondering if everything they remembered about the great Gatsby had been a dream.

Then you don't know anything," I said. "Of course not," she said. "Why would I? I'm not suppose to know a thing for myself." She learned forward her skirt lapping at the night. "Men love beautiful, useless, expensive things. So I'm meant to be one. I'm not supposed to be anything but a beautiful little fool.

There's no use denying that I fell a little bit in love with Jay, at least as much in love as I've ever been with any body. You see, Nicky, boys are always falling in love with me, but I don't fall much in love with them. I've always wondered if something was wrong with me, to tell you the truth, but Gloria says that's the best way for things to be, for a boy to love a girl faster and more than the girl loves him. And really, I don't know if I was truly in love with Jay, but I got closer with him than I'd ever been. So maybe that was falling in love? It may not have been the great romance of storybooks, but that feeling of someone seeing into the center of you and recognizing you, what else could that be but love? Don't even best friends have to fall a little in love?

We'd gotten swept up in the impossible magic of so many hearts being fearlessly themselves.

Gatsby looked back at me how any boy in the world would want to be looked at, as though there was such infinite possibility in me, such infinite light, that I was one endless, longest day of the year

And I was in a fine mood to kick the ass of the boy who had talked me into this only to run off.

She would be the ethereal dream that floated across their closed eyelids tonight.

You think I'm gay?" I asked. "Aren't we all?" Martha gave me a smiling glance. "Young and gay and radiant, and ready for all sorts of gay exciting things?" I tapped the window as though starting a toast. "Gay and radiant, all of us.

Don't you already know all the things we want and can't have?

[...] And I found what she already knew and what I knew too but hadn't wanted to think too much about. I learned it was to my benefit to look a certain way. People treat a girl very differently depending on how she looks. Doors open that you didn't ever know could be doors because they always looked like walls.

I could understand it now, her draw to money. It let you do things for people you loved.

Every beautiful thing can be broken down into math," I said. "There are numbers under all of it." "Isn't that a little cold?" he asked. "No," I said. "It's comforting. It means that underneath everything that's ever moved you or that you've ever loved, there's something real and irrefutable. There's a lattice of numbers proving that it's true, that it's really there, that you didn't just imagine all of it.

Once you work so hard at something that it starts breaking your body, I think it just doesn't taste very good anymore.

But my heart now followed his the way his followed Daisy’s. She was the sun around which his being orbited, and I was his moon, shadowed and undetected.