Quotes
Quote 1: "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." Chapter 1, pg. 1
Quote 2: "[It is] 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." Chapter 1, pg. 2
Quote 3: "[Tom] would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game." Chapter 1, pg. 6
Quote 4: "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year....Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it." Chapter 1, pg. 12
Quote 5: "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....And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Chapter 1, pgs. 17-18
Quote 6: "[Gatsby gazed at] a single green light, minute and faraway, that might have been the end of a dock." Chapter 1, pg. 22
Quote 7: "[There was] a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens." Chapter 2, pg. 23
Quote 8: "He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive."Chapter 2, pg. 26
Quote 9: "'He borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in, and never told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out...I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried...all afternoon.'" Chapter 2, pg. 35
Quote 10: "Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets....I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without." Chapter 2, pg. 36
Quote 11: "I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited - they went there." Chapter 3, pg. 41
Quote 12: "'This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too - didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?'" Chapter 3, pg. 46
Quote 13: "[Gatsby's smile had] a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life....It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself." Chapter 3, pg. 48
Quote 14: "'[The soloist said she] had a fight with a man who says he's her husband.'...Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands." Chapter 3, pg. 52
Quote 15: "[Nick] felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others...poor young clerks...waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner - young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life." Chapter 3, pg. 57
Quote 16: "It takes two to make an accident." Chapter 3, pg. 59
Quote 17: "'He's a bootlegger....One time he killed a man who found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.'" Chapter 4, pg. 61
Quote 18: "'Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can't forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there....they shot him three times in the belly and drove away." Chapter 4, pg. 70-71
Quote 19: "'I belong to another generation....You sit...and discuss your sports and your young ladies....As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won't impose myself on you any longer.'" Chapter 4, pg. 73
Quote 20: "A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: 'There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.'" Chapter 4, pg. 81
Quote 21: "Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes." Chapter 5, pg. 86
Quote 22: "[They sold the mansion] with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry." Chapter 5, pg. 89
Quote 23: "'It makes me sad because I've never seen such - such beautiful shirts before.'" Chapter 5, pg. 94
Quote 24: "'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.'" Chapter 5, pg. 94
Quote 25: "'One thing's sure and nothing's surer/The rich get richer and the poor get - children./ In the meantime,/ In between time--'....[In their rapture] [t]hey had forgotten me....Gatsby didn't know me now at all....they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life." Chapter 5, pg. 96-7
Quote 26: "His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God...and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented...Jay Gatsby...and to this conception he was faithful to the end." Chapter 6, pg. 99
Quote 27: "It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment." Chapter 6, pg.105
Quote 28: "She was appalled by West Egg...by its raw vigor that chafed...and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand." Chapter 6, pg. 108
Quote 29: "[Gatsby] wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. 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." Chapter 6, pg. 111-12
Quote 30: "Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans." Chapter 7, pg. 115
Quote 31: "[Nick realized that] there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was so sick that he looked guilty." Chapter 7, pg. 124
Quote 32: "...with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room." Chapter 7, pg. 135
Quote 33: "[There was] the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age....So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight." Chapter 7, pg. 136-7
Quote 34: "[Nick] had enough of all of them for one day, and suddenly that included Jordan too. She must have seen something of this in my expression, for she turned abruptly away and ran up the porch steps into the house." Chapter 7, pg. 143
Quote 35: "Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table....They weren't happy...yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together." Chapter 7, pg. 146
Quote 36: "[Daisy had] a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms...of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender....It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy - it increased her value in his eyes." Chapter 8, pg. 148
Quote 37: "[Gatsby] stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast...and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever." Chapter 8, pg. 153
Quote 38: "'"God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!'"" Chapter 8, pg. 160
Quote 39: "Gatsby himself didn't believe [her call] would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. 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. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...." Chapter 8, pg. 162
Quote 40: "He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and splendor of the hall...his grief began to be mixed with an awed pride." Chapter 9, pg. 168-9
Quote 41: "'When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out. When I was a young man it was different...I stuck with them to the end...Let us learn to show friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead....'" Chapter 9, pg. 173
Quote 42: "That's my Middle West...the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark....I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house....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." Chapter 9, pg. 177
Quote 43: "Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock....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." Chapter 9, pg. 182
Quote 44: "tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....And one fine morning----- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Chapter 9, pg. 182
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