| “I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams.” | Nick |
| “Nothing happened. I waited, and about four o’clock she came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned out to the light.” | Gatsby |
| “His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes.” | Gatsby |
| “You ought to go away. It’s pretty certain they’ll trace your car.” | Gatsby |
| “He wouldn’t consider it. He couldn’t possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn’t bear to shake him free.” | Gatsby |
| “She was the first “nice” girl he had ever known.” | Daisy |
| “He let her believe that he was a person from much of the same stratum as herself–that he was fully able to take care of her.” | Gatsby |
| “He did extraordinary well in the war.” | Gatsby |
| “She didn’t see why he couldn’t come. 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.” | Daisy |
| “She wanted her life shaped now, immediately–and the decision must be made by some force–of love, of money, of unquestionable practicability–that was close at hand.” | Daisy |
| “He told her those things in a way that frightened her–that made it look as if I was some kind of cheap sharper.” | Tom |
| “I didn’t want to go to the city. I wasn’t worth a decent stroke of work, but it was more than that–I didn’t want to leave Gatsby. I missed that train, and then another, before I could get myself away.” | Nick |
| “You weren’t so nice to me last night.” | Jordan |
| “But when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry, “Oh, my God!” again in his groaning voice.” | Wilson |
| “How long have you been married, George? Come there, try and sit still a minute and answer my question. How long have you been married? | Michaelis |
| “The effort of answering broke the rhythm of his rocking–for a moment he was silent. Then the same half-knowing, half-bewildered look came back in his faded eyes.” | Wilson |
| “I found it yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it, but I knew it was something funny.” | Myrtle |
| “You’re morbid, George. This has been a strain to you and you don’t know what you’re saying. You’d better try and sit quiet till morning.” | Michaelis |
| “I know. I’m one of these trusting fellas and I don’t think any harm to nobody, but when I get to know a thing I know it. It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he wouldn’t stop.” | Wilson |
| “I spoke to her. I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window–and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. you may fool me, but you can’t fool God!” | Wilson |
| “That’s an advertisement.” | Michaelis |
| “By half-past two he was in West Egg, where he asked some one the way to Gatsby’s house. So by that time he knew Gatsby’s name.” | Wilson |
| “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.” | Gatsby |
| “It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw _____’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.” | Wilson |
| “So _____ was reduced to man “deranged by grief” in order that the case might remain in its simplest form. And it rested there.” | Wilson |
| “I called up Daisy half an hour after we found him, called her instinctively and without hesitation. But she and Tom had gone away early that afternoon, and taken baggage with them.” | Nick |
| “I wanted to get somebody for him. I wanted to go into the room where he lay and reassure him: “I’ll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don’t worry. Just trust me and I’ll get somebody for you–“ | Nick |
| “Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me. You’ve got to try hard. I can’t go through this alone.” | Gatsby |
| “I was sure he’d start when he saw the newspapers, just as I was sure he’d start when he saw the newspapers, just as I was sure there’d be a wire from Daisy before noon.” | Wolfsheim |
| “I cannot come down now as I am tied up in some very important business and cannot get mixed up in this thing now. If there is anything I can do a little later let me know in a letter by Edgar. I hardly know where I am when I hear about a thing like this and am completely knocked down and out.” | Wolfsheim |
| “Hello! Look here–this isn’t Mr. Gatsby. Mr. Gatsby’s dead.” | Nick |
| “His eyes leaked continuously with excitement, and when I took the bag and umbrella from his hands he began to pull so incessantly at his sparse grey beard that I had difficulty in getting off his coat.” | Mr. Gatz (Gatsby’s dad) |
| “I saw it in the Chicago newspaper. It was all in the Chicago newspaper. I started right away.” | Mr. Gatz |
| “_____ always liked it better down East. He rose up to his position in the East.” | Gatsby |
| “He had a big future before him, you know. He was only a young man, but he had a lot of brain power here.” | Gatsby |
| “If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man. A man like Jams J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country.” | Mr. Gatz |
| “My memory goes back to when I first met him. A young major just got out of the army and covered with medals he got in the war. He was so hard up he had to keep on wearing his uniform because he couldn’t buy some regular clothes.” | Wolfsheim |
| “First time I saw him was when he come into Winebrenner’s poolroom at Forty-third Street and asked for a job. He hadn’t eat anything for a couple of days. ‘Come on have some lunch with me,’ I said. He ate more than four dollars’ worth of food in half an hour.” | Gatsby |
| “I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter.” | Wolfsheim |
| “Now he’s dead. You were his closest friend, so I know you’ll want to come to his funeral this afternoon.” | Wolfsheim |
| “When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it any way. I keep out. When I was a young man it was different–if a friend of mine died, no matter how, I stuck with them to the end. You may think that’s sentimental, but I mean it–to the bitter end.” | Wolfsheim |
| “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. After that, my own rule is to let everything alone.” | Wolfsheim |
| “The minister glanced several times at his watch, so I took him aside and asked him to wait for half an hour. But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.” | Nick |
| “Nevertheless you did throw me over. You threw me over on the telephone. 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.” | Jordan |
| “You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.” | Jordan |
| “I’m thirty. I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.” | Nick |
| “What’s the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?” | Tom |
| “You’re crazy Nick. Crazy as hell. I don’t know what’s the matter with you.” | Tom |
| “I told him the truth. He came to the door while we were getting ready to leave, and when I sent down word that we weren’t in he tried to force his way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn’t told him who owned the car.” | Tom |
| “And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering–look here, when I went to give up the flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful–“ | Tom |
| “I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.” | Nick |
| “I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child.” | Nick |
| “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 |
The Great Gatsby Chapter 8 & 9 Quotes
March 26, 2020