Quotes on Great Gatsby American Dream

You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.