More Gatsby quotes

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. The Great Gatsby Chapter 6, on Daisy.

He 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. The Great Gatsby Chapter 6, on Gatsby.

Can't repeat the past?…Why of course you can! The Great Gatsby Chapter 6, Gatsby.

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. The Great Gatsby Chapter 6, Gatsby on his first kiss with Daisy.

Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans. The Great Gatsby Chapter 7.

Her voice is full of money. The Great Gatsby Chapter 1, Gatsby about Daisy.

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. Wilson was so sick that he looked guilty. The Great Gatsby Chapter 7.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control. The Great Gatsby Chapter 7, Nick, on Tom Buchanan.

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. The Great Gatsby Chapter 7, Jordan.

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that's the idea you can count me out. The Great Gatsby Chapter 7, Tom Buchanan on Gatsby.

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. The Great Gatsby Chapter 7.

....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. The Great Gatsby Chapter 7.

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. The Great Gatsby Chapter 7.

It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy - it increased her value in his eyes. The Great Gatsby Chapter 8.

God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God! The Great Gatsby Chapter 8.

"They are a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time. The Great Gatsby Chapter 8, Nick on Gatsby.

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. The Great Gatsby Chapter 8.

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. The Great Gatsby Chapter 9.

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. The Great Gatsby Chapter 9.

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. The Great Gatsby Chapter 9.

After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home. The Great Gatsby Chapter 9.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. The Great Gatsby Chapter 9, Nick on the Buchanans.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. The Great Gatsby Chapter 9.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out Daisy's light at the end of his dock. He had come such a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. The Great Gatsby Chapter 9.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic 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…And one fine morning- The Great Gatsby Chapter 9.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. The Great Gatsby Chapter 9, Nick on resilience.