| “The less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them.” | West Egg |
| “At the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the sound and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season… a small eyesore.” | Nick’s house |
| “A factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn.” | Gatsby’s mansion |
| “He’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away; for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.” | Tom Buchanan |
| “even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.” | The Buchanan house |
| “He was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward… It was a body capable of enormous cruelty.” | Tom Buchanan |
| “They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back after a short flight around the house.” | Daisy and Jordan |
| “She was extended full length at the end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes, she gave no hint of it.” | Jordan |
| “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… there was an excitement in her voice that men who 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.” | Daisy’s voice |
| “Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes, and a bright, passionate mouth.” | Daisy |
| “She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with the polite reciprocal curiosity of a wan, charming, discontented face.” | Jordan |
| “She carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.” | Myrtle |
| “He was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic and faintly handsome.” | George Wilson |
| “A fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke…” | The Valley of Ashes |
| “Dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.” | Eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg |
| “With the influence of the dress, her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur.” | Myrtle |
| “a slender, wordly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white… she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.” | Catherine (Myrtle’s sister) |
| “a pale, feminine man from the flat below…a photographer.” | Mr McKee |
| “shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible” | Mrs McKee |
| “He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quantity of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.” | Gatsby |
| “She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young” | Jordan |
| “a small, flat-nosed Jew with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril.” | Wolfsheim |
| “fixed the World Series back in 1919” | Wolfsheim |
| “His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.” | The green light |
| “She was appalled by West Egg… appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that heralded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.” | Daisy |
Great Gatsby Description Quotes
April 5, 2020