- "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..."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 7 - "So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 7 - "It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy--it increased her value in his eyes."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 8 - "God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!"
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 8 - "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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 9 - "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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 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."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 9 - "I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 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-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 9
The Great Gatsby Quotes
By Esther Lombardi, About.com
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