READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!!
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So I haven't written in awhile, because school started up, but I just finished "The Great Gatsby" and have been inspired to post about it. Because it's not my favorite book. Which is saying a lot because I am a very avid reader!
Anyway, here are some of my favorite quotes (Mostly in chronological order) - for different reasons:
"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away." p. 2
This quote means a lot to me because by the end of the book, it made me realize even more fully exactly how much personality is NOT a series of successful gestures. In class, we talked a lot about how the successful gestures that James Gatz made were the mask he wore as Gatsby; the gestures created a fake personality that fell apart when he couldn't fill the cracks with emotion. Emotion is successful to a personality. If you only go through the motions and make gestures just for the hell of it, you don't have a personality.
"I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the Park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life." -p. 35
This quote is great because if describes Nick's position as both the observer and the participant eloquently and without being too obvious.
"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 external 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." -p. 48
I'd be so enchanted to come across one of these smiles like Gatsby's just once… For all our talk of making sure to not be self-centered or selfish, we all could use one of these smiles to let us know exactly how appreciated we are.
"For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing." -p. 99
I'm still not entirely sure what this passage meant, but I know that it put a darkness on Gatsby. He's more tentative than he seems to the outside world. And I know that when he's living this dream, he still isn't satisfied. "…a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing." …That's beautiful.
"Almost the last thing I remember was standing with Daisy and watching the moving-picture director and his Star. They were still under the white-plum tree and their faces were touching except for a pale, thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and kiss at her cheek." -p. 107
What struck me about this passage was that the director and his Star were more real to Daisy than the non-actors. Gatsby is almost like the director in that he plans for so long before making the final move.
"When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again." -p. 176
This quote means something to me because of my own personal connection with the winter. Everything about this last quote applies to how I feel about it.
"Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." -p. 180
Something about this quote makes me catch my breath and sit back for a moment, though I am not sure what it means. On the same page, it continues,
"And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he had first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed to close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity behind the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future, that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And one fine morning ---
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
It speaks for itself. It's magic.
Absolute magic.
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