The Great Gatsby Quotes

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

Chapter number : 9 Page number : 180
10241

Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive.

Page number : 30
21

I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

9047

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

4779

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

3625

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.

3541

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.

3324

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

3248

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

3153

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

3025

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.

2704

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

2592

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

2039

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.

1843

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

1829

Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!

1693

They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.

1553

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

1395

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.

1287

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

1249

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

1201

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.

1158

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

1058

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

1036

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

984

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

982

It takes two to make an accident.

964

He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.

908

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he 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 so 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 beyond 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.

899

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him

816

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

803

Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.You always look so cool," she repeated.She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.

798

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…

647

...and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires

604

Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!

582

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

534

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 ---

489

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

438

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered Listen, a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

424

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.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

398

She’s got an indiscreet voice, I remarked. It’s full of– I hesitated.Her voice is full of money, he said suddenly.That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money–that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.

390

If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay. You always have a green light that burns at the end of your dock.

389

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

354

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

335

She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

326

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

323

And what's more, I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.

305

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? cried Daisy, and the day after that, and the next thirty years?

303

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.

303