Quotes from The Great Gatsby

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

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

I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.

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 anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’

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

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

It’s a great thing for a man to want to improve himself.

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

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

Men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

Don’t forget that I’m responsible for you!

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

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.

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

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 for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

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

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

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.

Then she added irrelevantly: ‘You ought to see the baby.’

Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

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

Absorbed in his own fears, Tom had not been interested in Jordan… but now he made a familiar object out of her, and saw it was the flat on which he had been driving Tom and Daisy Buchanan back when he first saw them.

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

He did not know that it was already behind him.

That’s my Middle West . . . the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark.

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.

All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black, to indicate that a funeral is taking place.

His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was…

There was the dance, and there was Marjorie, and this is the end.

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.

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

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

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o’clock

I swear to God I can’t get acquainted with you for five minutes without you’re making me feel uncivilized.

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

He stretched out his hand desperately as if in appeal … Then he gave a sudden intimation of how he knew Daisy.

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end.

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

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

He felt married to her, that was all.

I am trying to keep it straight in my head without getting annoyed.

There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender, but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered.

The grass on the lawn became a thin wire net, scratching her as she tried to get up.

The light was on upstairs and she was not there.

I told you I went there at least once a month. Didn’t I?

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.