Categories: Quotes

Jay Gatsby Quotes

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

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

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

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart and all they can do is stare blankly.

I’m certainly glad to see you again. I thought I was never going to see you again.

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

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

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

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.’

It takes two to make an accident.

I was reminded of something an old man had once said about going over the falls in a barrel, and dying just a minute before you would have done some wonderful trick.

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.

Why did you divorce him?

Jay Gatsby Quotes part 2

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

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

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

I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.

I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

You see, I think everything’s terrible anyhow.

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.

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

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.

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

It’s his Rolls-Royce, if you want to know.

With the influence of wealthy people, the working class may soon discover that they have been influenced by consumerist culture and/or social norms.

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

You see, I think everything’s terrible anyhow.

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

The man who fixed the world, a self-made success story

Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn

I was twenty-three and an Assistant Producer with an incontinent elephant on my hands

He was just a man like me who tells this story and as anyone else I’ve ever met in my life

Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees — he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

She was decently clothed in a dress of dark blue serge, or something of that kind

An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota

That was in nineteen-nineteen

It was a strange coincidence,

Were at present staying indefinitely

It was a lucky hit

Had no acquaintance

A solemn old man

Cheap orly gilt over plaster?

And what are we going to do now, Tom?

You expected to be a red hot center for at least twelve months

Four cocktails