Quotes on Great Gatsby Gatsby

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that 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.

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

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

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

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

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

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. 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.

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

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.

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

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.

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.