| Meyer Wolfsheim on Gatsby with women (p58) | Yeah, Gatsby’s very careful about women. He would never so much as look at a friends wife. |
| Gatsby talking about his past (p52) | I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle-West – all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford. |
| Nick on his opinion of Gatsby (p122) | They’re a rotten crowd… You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together. |
| Nick seeing Gatsby for the first time (p20) | He stretched out his arms towards the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. |
| Description of Gatsby after meeting Daisy again (p71) | He literally glowed; without a word or gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room. |
| Daisy on Gatsby (p94) | You always look so cool. |
| Gatsby’s thoughts on kissing Daisy (p88) | 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. |
| What Gatsby believed in (p144) | Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. |
| Description of Gatsby before meeting Daisy again (p68) | Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes. |
| Speculation about Gatsby 1 (p36) | Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once. |
| Speculation about Gatsby 2 (p36) | …it’s more that he was a German spy during the war. |
| Nick on Gatsby and his dream (p 128) | …paid a high price for living too long with a single dream |
| Gatsby on the past (p 88) | Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can! |
| The truth about Gatsby (p 79) | The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that… |
| Nick on Gatsby’s smile (p 40) | 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. |
| Nick on how Gatsby turned out (p 6) | Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short winded elations of men. |
| Jordan on finding Daisy before her wedding night (p 60) | …found her lying on the bed lovely as the June night and drunk as a monkey. |
| Daisy’s thoughts on seeing Gatsby again (p 69) | I certainly am awfully glad to see you again. |
| Nick’s description of Daisy (p 11) | Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright, passionate mouth. |
| Daisy on Gatsby’s house (p 72) | That huge place there? |
| Gatsby on Daisy’s voice (p 96) | Her voice is full of money. |
| Daisy on the longest day of the year (p 13) | In two weeks it’ll be the longest day of the year… Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it. |
| Nick on Tom and Daisy (p 142) | 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. |
| Nick on his relation to Daisy (p 8) | Daisy was my second cousin once removed. |
| Daisy on herself (p 17) | Sophisticated – God, I’m sophisticated. |
| Daisy on her daughter (p 17) | All right… I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. |
| Nicks description of Daisy when they meet (p 11) | She laughed again, as if she had said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no-one in the world that she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had… |
| Jordan Baker on Daisy’s reputation (p 61) | She came out with an absolutely perfect reputation. Perhaps because she doesn’t drink. |
| Nicks fathers advice (p 5) | Whenever you feel like criticising anyone… just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. |
| Nick on his desires (p 48) | I am slow thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires. |
| What Nick said he did after Gatsby’s death (p 143) | I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and laughter, faint and incessant from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. |
| Tom Buchanan on Nick (p 142) | You’re crazy, Nick… crazy as hell. I don’t know what’s the matter with you. |
| Nick on judgements 1 (p 5) | I’m inclined to reserve all judgements. |
| Nick on judgements 2 (p 5) | … reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope |
| Jordan Baker on Nick (p 141) | I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride. |
| Nick asks Jordan to dinner (p 63) | I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. |
| Nick on his birthday (p 108) | No… I just remembered that today is my birthday. |
| Nick on being thirty (p 108) | Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade… |
| Nick on his ‘snobbishness’ (p 5) | … a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. |
| Nick on the middle west (p 140) | That’s my middle west – not the wheat or the prairies or the lost swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth. |
| Nick on the cardinal virues (p 48) | Everybody suspects themselves of one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine, I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. |
| Nick on honour (p 141) | Im thirty… five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour. |
| Tom Buchanan on Jordan Baker (p 19) | She’s a nice girl, they oughtn’t let her run around the country this way. |
| Nick on Jordan’s dishonesty (p 48) | She was incurably dishonest… |
| Nick on Jordan Baker (p 63) | …this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal scepticism. |
| Jordan on her relationship with Nick (p 63) | I don’t give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while. |
| Nick on his kiss with Jordan (p 64) | Her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face. |
| Nick on his break up with Jordan (p 141) | Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. |
| Nick on a story about Jordan (p 19) | I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story. |
| Nick’s description of Jordan (p 12) | 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. |
| Daisy on Jordan’s family (p 19) | Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. |
| Nick on being unable to talk to Jordan (p 123) | I couldn’t have talked to her across a tea-table that day if I never talked to her again in this world. |
| Jordan’s lie (p 47) | She left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down and then lied about it. |
| Tom’s transition (p 103) | The transition from libertine to prig was so complete. |
| Tom on what others think about him (p 96) | You think I’m pretty dumb, don’t you? |
| Nick on Tom Buchanan’s lifestyle (p 8) | … seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some long lost forgotten football game. |
| Nick on Tom Buchanan as a young man (p 8) | … one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterwards savours of anti climax. |
| Description of Tom Buchanan (p 9) | … a sturdy straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. |
Great Gatsby Quotes
April 10, 2020