There aren’t too many books out there that could brag and say, “Yeah, I defined an era.” Among these few chosen ones is The Great Gatsby, a novel that everyone has read or at least heard about.
Its story is an interesting one: When F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925, it didn’t get the success it has today and was actually deemed a disappointment compared to his previous works. When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he considered himself a failure. But during World War II, the Council on Books in Wartime decided to distribute free copies of the novel to American soldiers, which led to a surge in popularity and a re-evaluation of the book. The result? The Great Gatsby was included in every US high school curriculum and became essential to American literature.
Fitzgerald’s writing style is fluid and easy to follow, but at the same time, it’s meant to be savored, to make you pause and reflect. Though the central plot might seem like a romance — with Nick Carraway narrating the story of millionaire Jay Gatsby and his deep love for Daisy Buchanan — it’s actually more nuanced than that. The way it explores social class issues, gender, race, environmentalism, and the cynical criticism of the American Dream makes this book an unmissable gem.
And like every great piece of literature, the number of symbolic quotes in it is incredible. We have collected the best quotes from The Great Gatsby that will make you want to look at it again and will stay with you long after you finish reading.
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“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.”
“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.”
“They conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park.”
“The thing to do is to forget about the heat. You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.”
“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.”
“‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”
“All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’”
"Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair."
“One emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.”
“I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed--that voice was a deathless song.”
“People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.”
“Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!”
“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.”
“It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy — it increased her value in his eyes."
“The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.”
“For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened — then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.”
“Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.”
“They’re a rotten crowd,- I shouted across the lawn. 'You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
“There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. 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.”
“He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn't realize just how extraordinary a 'nice' girl could be.”
“He was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor.”
“She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand.”
“After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby's party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world.”
“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”
“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
“The bottle of whiskey — the second one — was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who ‘felt just as good on nothing at all.’”
“I hope she’ll be a fool. That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
“Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.”
“Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care.”
“His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.”
“And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.”
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
“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.”
“They’re such beautiful shirts,- she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”
“God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!”
“Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace.”
“There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”
“Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”
“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock... Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”
"The tears coursed down her cheeks- not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets."
"The night had made a sharp difference in the weather and there was an autumn flavor in the air.”
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money on their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
“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.”
“...but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering.”
“He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.”
“We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.”
“One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.”
“So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.”
“He found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”
“A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.”
“When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.”
“He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.”
“I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.”
“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.”
“I suppose he smiled at Cody — he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled.”
“By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.”
“He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.”
“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
“I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and when she gave me the bill you'd of thought she had my appendix out.”
“It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.”
“Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.”
“For awhile these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.”
“The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.”
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself... 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.”
“I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.”
“He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths — so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden.”
“Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry... I'd be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”
“It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made.”
“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'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.”
“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.”
“While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little now and then with gusts of emotion.”
"Just as Daisy's house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.”
“The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption — and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-bye.”
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
“You see, I usually find myself among strangers, because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
“I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything… Sophisticated — God, I’m sophisticated!"
"They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale - and yet they weren't unhappy either."
“There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby’s enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour.”
“I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.”
“It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.”
“[Tom was] one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterwards savors of anti-climax.”
“What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”
