Great Gatsby Book Quotes

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

People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.

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

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

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

he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

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.

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

The rich get richer and the poor get - children.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

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

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.

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.

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 - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... And one fine morning ---

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

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, 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.

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

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.

Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.

I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this 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. [- Nick Carroway]

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

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.

Feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember

That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

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

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

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

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

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

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

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...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

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 faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

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

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

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.

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. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

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

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.

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