The Great Gatsby Quotes

He had come such a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

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

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

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

Everyone 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.

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

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.

You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.

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

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.

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

He invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

I’ll tell you God’s truth, Ethel, if I’d have thought there was any doubt about that I wouldn’t have touched the matter, but I knew it was a bona-fide deal.

It takes two to make an accident.

That’s my Middle West… the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.

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

The truth is … the truth is that the past is probably another country, or perhaps another world, more than just a memory.

The rich are different than you and me.

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

You see, I think everything’s terrible anyhow.

It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or those other races will have control of things.

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

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

I didn’t want you to think I was just some nobody.

They’re such beautiful shirts, she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.

We all have our unincorporated areas.

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.

I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before, he said, nodding determinedly. She’ll see.

When I came back from the East last autumn, I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

You always look so cool, she repeated.

They’re a rotten crowd, I shouted across the lawn. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.

Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

It was all very careless and confused. 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…

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

I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

The rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The roses were blooming ga1yly, and she could smell their fragrance in the still night air.

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

An empty blue spotlight had traced a watery oblong above the xylophones and the first violins, and the triangle had sent a single soundless ping into the twilight.

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 – and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.

I disliked him so much by this time that I didn’t find it necessary to tell him he was wrong.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.