In my Honors English class, we just finished reading The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I found it boring at first; I was treating it the same way that I treat all read-aloud books in school. I was reading the words, but I wasn’t trying to comprehend them at all.
Once I began trying to understand the words, I began to notice the incredible sentences. I began contemplating their deeper meanings, and I truly started to appreciate Fitzgerald’s writing. I started underlining and writing down the quotes that felt like a pang in my heart, and then I went back and reread the book and underlined the sentences near the beginning.
“Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.”
The way I comprehended this was that if you don’t judge someone immediately, then it could change the way that you perceive them. I’m going to try to use this quote as a reminder that I shouldn’t judge people based on their first impressions; I should wait until I truly know them. Nobody deserves to be judged for how they first act because they might just be having a bad day or something. I think that everyone deserves a second chance.
“People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.”
Last year, on the last day of school, my old TCT teacher gave us a presentation. He was retiring, and he picked out a quote from The Great Gatsby that, to him, represented each of us. This was mine. To me, this quote represents when somebody is in a group but doesn’t always feel connected. It talks about how someone might feel invisible and alone even when they’re surrounded by other people who might even be exactly like them. While they don’t always feel connected, maybe, just maybe, they’ll eventually feel okay.
“Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.”
In the book, they had reached the peak of their sympathy; instead, they gave up and left. This quote was just so beautiful to me because human sympathy really does have its limits. Eventually, everyone has had enough, and they have stopped caring for everyone. For me, my sympathy still hasn’t quite reached its limit; I still feel for everyone who has been through anything. There are some people in the world who reached their limits a long time ago, and now, they’ve given up. They’ve stopped caring for others. This quote resonates with me because of the things going on everywhere right now. More and more people’s sympathy seems to reach its limit every day.
“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
This quote is one of my favorites. “Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry.” It’s just so beautiful. I don’t have much to say about it, but I need everyone to see this. It’s so incredible, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. It shows how conflicted Nick was feeling at the moment. I think it represents so many people’s day-to-day lives.
“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had was, to him, incredibly justified.”
When I read this one, I underlined it immediately. It stood out to me because it made me think deeply about my past arguments and relationships with friends. I spend a lot of time thinking about how I couldn’t believe that my friends did the things that they did to me. This quote made me realize that they might not have realized how much it hurt me because, to them, they were in the right. To them, they could’ve been doing the right thing. It also makes me wonder how often I do that. It makes me wonder how many times I thought something that I did was justified but was actually wrong.
“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—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…”
I knew that I needed to add one quote about the famous green light. To me, the green light represents the feeling of hope but also the feeling of separation. It represents distance, but the hope that one day that distance will close. As Gatsby sat on the dock, with his arms stretched out, staring across the water to that singular bright green light, he had the hope that someday he’d close the distance between him and the woman that he’d loved for years. The green light represents hope and shows the distance between people.
While this is less than half of the quotes that I saved, these ones were my favorite. It felt like they all represented me, even if it was just a little bit. Every single time I read these quotes I feel a little bit of pang in my heart because these quotes are truly incredible. The Great Gatsby was an incredible book, and I know that I’ll be reading it again.
