Study Guide
Here are more quotes from
The Great Gatsby:
- "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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 4
- "I belong to another generation... As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won't impose myself on you any longer."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 4
- "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.'"
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 4
- "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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 5
- "Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 5
- "It makes me sad because I've never seen such - such beautiful shirts before."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 5
- "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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 5
- "One thing's sure and nothing's surer/ The rich get richer and the poor get - children./ In the meantime,/ In between time--"
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 5
- "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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 5
- "they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 5
- "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 just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 6
- "It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 6
- "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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 6
- "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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 6
- "Can't repeat the past?... Why of course you can!"
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 6
- "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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 6
- "Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 7
- "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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 7
- "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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 7
- "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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 7
- "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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 7
