Gatsby Quotes

A naive, excitable teenaged reader is a beautiful thing. Someone who's never heard of Elizabeth Bennet or Jay Gatsby, until you tell him. And they all still believe in truth. That's the fun of it. ~ Holly LeCraw

Not long ago, after my last trip to Russia, I had a conversation with an American very eminent in the field of politics. I asked what he read, and he replied that he studied history, sociology, politics and law.

"How about fiction - novels, plays poetry?" I asked.

"No," he said, "I have never had time for them. There's so much else I have to read."

I said, "Sir, I have recently visited Russia for the third time and don't know how well I understand Russians; but I do know that if I only read Russian history I could not have had the access to Russian thinking I have had from reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Sholokhov, and Ehrenburg. History only recounts, with some inaccuracy, what they did. The fiction tells, or tries to tell, why they did it and what they felt and were like when they did it."

My friend nodded gravely. "I hadn't though of that," he said. "Yes, that might be so; I had always thought of fiction as opposed to fact."

But in considering the American past, how poor we would be in information without Huckleberry Fin, An American Tragedy, Winesburg, Ohio, Main Street, The Great Gatsby, and As I Lay Dying. ~ John Steinbeck

Poor Williams was left holding the civic bag; he had taken a gutsy stand, his image was all moxie . . . and on Monday night, when the Angels were finally gone, he had earned the leisure that enabled him to go out to the lakefront and gaze off in a proud wistful way, like Gatsby, at the green neon lights of the tavern across the water, where the others were counting their money. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Just handling this ocean of different books - new and used, in and out of print, famous and forgotten - it was literature as this giant mosaic of texts and experiments and attitudes. I think it's just very liberating to break out of a great man's theory of history.
I guess I've always liked working from that sense of - what would you call it? - license that the margins permit. I always just visualize myself writing books that were meant one day to be dusty, forgotten volumes being encountered by intrepid browsers in a used bookstore. It was a much less freighted way to think about trying to enter the conversation than to imagine I had to write The Great Gatsby. ~ Jonathan Lethem

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

I wish I'd done everything on Earth with you. ~ Baz Luhrmann

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The most enduring stories in literature generally have some kind of crime at their center, whether it's the bloody butchery of 'Hamlet,' the lecherous misanthropes of Dickens or the lone gunman from 'The Great Gatsby.' ~ Karin Slaughter

Images sometimes capture particular periods in history. The unreachable green light, beckoning from across the bay in 'The Great Gatsby,' has become a symbol of the yearning of America in the 1920s. ~ David Ignatius

If this were a fairy tale, this would be the part where the fishboy appears and Diana shoots him through the heart. Because he is a tragic hero, he's our fucking Gatsby, and he lived for his fish and he has to die for his fish. He would never let my fake authority, condoning his abandonment, making up rules about what's okay just to save his life, convince him to give up his family. He would never leave.
He would know that without him, none of us will be as good. Me, without a friend; and the fish, without a brother; and the island, without a story; and Diana, without her something real, we will all be a little bit less than we were before we knew him.
So he wouldn't leave. Not until I could come with him. And I have never been less able to leave than I am now.
But this isn't a fairy tale, and he doesn't appear. We stand here for a long time.
He really left.
Because it was all that we could do. ~ Hannah Moskowitz

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn 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. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction - Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

She's got an indiscreet voice,' I remarked. 'It's full of - - ' I hesitated. 'Her voice is full of money,' he said suddenly. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

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. - The Great Gatsby. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The Colors, The Iliad, Ulysses, Metamorphosis, the Theban plays, The Draconic Labels, Anabasis, and restricted works like The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, Lady Casterly's Penance, 1984, and The Great Gatsby. I ~ Pierce Brown

That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said "On the Road." He smiled, said, "That was my favorite book at sixteen." At the time , I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I'm more of a Gatsby girl-more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer. ~ Sarah Vowell

Mr. Leonardo DiCaprio - he be soo gorgeous, no wonder all the ladies flockin' to him - He be Gatsby. ~ Amitabh Bachchan

In the last month or so, i have read the great gatsby and a separate peace. i am starting to see a real trend in the kind of books bill gives me to read. and just like the tape of songs, it is amazing to hold each of them in the palm of my hand. they are all my favorites. all of them. ~ Stephen Chbosky

He's just a man names Gatsby. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Where the road sloped upward beyond the trees, I sat and looked toward the building where Naoko lived. It was easy to tell which room was hers. All I had to do was find the one window toward the back where a faint light trembled. I focused on that point of light for a long, long time. It made me think of something like the final throb of a soul's dying embers. I wanted to cup my hands over what was left and keep it alive. I went on watching the way Jay Gatsby watched that tiny light on the opposite shore night after night. ~ Haruki Murakami

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God - a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that - and he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I see you're looking at my cuff buttons.
I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Who is he anyhow, an actor?"
"No."
"A dentist?"
" ... No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added cooly: "He's the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919."
"Fixed the World Series?" I repeated.
The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people
with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.
"How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute.
"He just saw the opportunity."
"Why isn't he in jail?"
"They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby' [ ... ] was my 'Tom Sawyer' when I was twelve [ ... ] ~ J.D. Salinger

This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the 'creative temperament' - it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No - Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

At this point Jordan and I tried to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we remain - as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Van Houten was still staring at the ceiling beams. He took a drink. The glass was almost empty again. 'Lidewij, I can't do it. I can't. I can't.' He leveled his gaze to me. 'Nothing happens to the Dutch Tulip Man. He isn't a con man or not a con man; he's God. He's an obvious and unambiguous metaphorical representation of God, and asking what becomes of him if the intellectual equivalent of asking what becomes of the disembodied eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in Gatsby. Do he and Anna's man get married? We are speaking of a novel, dear child, not some historical enterprise. ~ John Green

Hating "The Great Gatsby" (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the next thirty years? ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

How happily we explored our shiny new world! We lived like characters from the great books I curled up with in the big Draylon armchair. Like Jack Kerouak, like Gatsby, we created ourselves as we went along, a raggle-taggle of gypsies in old army overcoats and bell-bottoms, straggling through the fields that surrounded our granite farmhouse in search of firewood, which we dragged home and stacked in the living room. Ignorant and innocent, we acted as if the world belonged to us, as though we would ever have taken the time to hang the regency wallpaper we damaged so casually with half-rotten firewood, or would have known how to hang it straight, or smooth the seams. We broke logs against the massive tiled hearth and piled them against the sooty fire back, like the logs were tradition and we were burning it, like chimney fires could never happen, like the house didn't really belong to the poor divorcee who paid the rates and mortgage even as we sat around the flames like hunter gatherers, smoking Lebanese gold, chanting and playing the drums, dancing to the tortured music of Luke's guitar. Impelled by the rhythm, fortified by poorly digested scraps of Lao Tzu, we got up to dance, regardless of the coffee we knocked over onto the shag carpet. We sopped it up carelessly, or let it sit there as it would; later was time enough. We were committed to the moment.




Everything was easy and beautiful if you looked at it right. If someone was angry, we walked d ~ Claire Robson

It's Fitzgerald's thin-but-durable urge to affirm that finally makes Gatsby worthy of being our Great American Novel. Its soaring conclusion tells us that, even though Gatsby dies and the small and corrupt survive, his longing was nonetheless magnificent. ~ Maureen Corrigan

One emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Never miss a party ... good for the nerves
like celery. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns at the end of your dock."
Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to him, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted things had diminished by one. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it? ~ Chuck Palahniuk

It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

He never had time to read on the outside, but here he joins a book club where they discuss The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is The Night with a fervent young professor who seems unaware that anyone other than F. Scott Fitzgerald has ever written a book. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

He stayed there for a week , walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which they had driven in her white car. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help me while away the hours as the rain pounds down on the porch roof, taking me away from the gloom and on to somewhere sunny, somewhere else. ~ Anna Quindlen

I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s. ~ Garrett Hedlund

They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family. ~ Francis Ford Coppola

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

There's green eyes in my eyes
And a lover on my mind
And I sing from the piano
Tear my yellow dress and
Cry and cry and cry
Over the love of you ~ Florence Welch

Gatsby's self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is many ways identical to my father's. Like Gatsby, my father fueled this transformation with the "colossal vitality of his illusion". Unlike Gatsby he did this on a school teacher's salary. ~ Alison Bechdel

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. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil. ~ Azar Nafisi

He broke off and began to walk u and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

What make Gatsby so damn great - like da book's title indicatin' - is dat unlike da rest of deez shallow rich folk, Gatsby actually believe in somethin': love, dawg. He build himself a new identity jus' for Daisy. Errybody else straight-up empty inside. ~ Sparky Sweets

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It is also about loss, about the perishability of dreams once they are transformed into hard reality. It is the longing, its immateriality, that makes the dream pure.

What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven. This was what we had in common, although we were not aware of it then.

Dreams, Mr Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.

When I left the class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream? ~ Azar Nafisi

Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees - he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody - told it to me because "Jay Gatsby" had broken up like glass against Tom's hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I am asking Scribners to insert as a subtitle in everything after the eighth printing
THE SUN ALSO RISES (LIKE YOUR COCK IF YOU HAVE ONE)
A greater Gatsby
(Written with the friendship of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Prophet of THE JAZZ AGE) ~ Ernest Hemingway,

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream. ~ Azar Nafisi

Take off that darn fur coat! ... Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It was quality that killed Lilly; it was the end of The Great Gatsby, which was not her ending, which was not an ending within her grasp. ~ John Irving

In such novels as This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald depicts the spirit of the hour which is usually about 4 a.m. His suave young men, always commuting between Princeton and The Plaza in Stutz Bearcats never sat still for long. It was too uncomfortable, with a large flask in the hip pocket. ~ Richard Armour

On The Great Gatsby: Fifteen-year-olds can really get behind an essay on what green light means, which is good, because they sure as heck won't relate to any of the characters, who are all huge jerks with enough money to be wasted most of the time on top of being miserable. ~ Kate Beaton

It's little strange, perhaps, to make this claim at such a late date, but Gatsby really is an outstanding novel. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I read it. It's the kind of a novel that nourishes you as you read, and every time I do, I'm struck by something new, and experience a fresh reaction to it. I find it how such a young writer, only twenty-nine at the time could grasp
so insightfully, so equitably, and so warmly
the realities of life. How was that possible? The more I think about it, and the more I read the novel, the more mysterious it all is. ~ Haruki Murakami

One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones. ~ Spencer Boldman

Every one 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. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind ... ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald's work was almost entirely out of print when 'The Lost Weekend' was published in 1944 - even 'Gatsby' seemed well on its way to being forgotten - and Jackson had meant to be 'deliberately prophetic' in calling attention to a writer he considered the foremost chronicler of 'the temper and spirit of the time.' More than twenty years later he finally received credit, in writing, for having played a key role in the so-called Fitzgerald Revival. ~ Blake Bailey

I should write a serious book on China. If I did that and put in a lot of subtext about love and maybe compared it to the Great Wall or communism or something I could show the parallels between how we are forced to act in society due to cultural mores, versus how we really are, like, behind our own personal Jungian Great Walls. Then people would take my writing seriously like they do with Marni and Tess and that guy who wrote the Great Gatsby. ~ Jesse James Freeman

I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby [is] my imaginary eldest brother. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

In my opinion, Fiction is a figment of our imagination & it causes us to dream but Reality taints dreams, and the F.scott Fitzgerald has clearly depicted this in The Great Gatsby. ~ Parul Wadhwa

Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' and it's sad, gay nostalgia. ~ Truman Capote

And a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country's writers. ~ Jonathan Yardley

You can't not like 'The Great Gatsby.' It's got the best sentences in, like, ever. ~ John Green

Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night. "God sees everything," repeated Wilson. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy or Gatsby anymore, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal skepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I picked up my college copy of 'The Great Gatsby' in an attempt to recover from the movie and was interested to find out what I'd underlined. The answer was basically: everything. ~ Gail Collins

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... And one fine morning
~ F Scott Fitzgerald

...we often imagined, as we drove, a fictional universe in which Fitzgerald's and Wodehouse's creations might visit one another. Bertie Wooster and Jeeves might have intruded on the rarefied world of the Eggs, silly-ass Bertie stepping into sensible Nick Carraway's shoes, and Reginald Jeeves the fish-eating Spinoza-loving gentleman's gentleman and genius finding a way to give Jay Gatsby the happy-ever-after ending with Daisy Buchanan for which he so profoundly longed. ~ Salman Rushdie

Movie directors who have filmed F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' believe it's a big book looming inside a small one, and they aren't altogether wrong. ~ Steve Erickson

My dark secret is I've always wished I was Gatsby. As heartbroken as he was and as horrible a fate as he endured, I admired that he loved. It's a difficult thing to do. ~ Sarah Noffke

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

He found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

'The Great Gatsby' ticked so many boxes for me. ~ Joel Edgerton

Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I've been thinking I'd like to be Daisy; I'd like to have someone like Gatsby stare at my house for whole years and never stop dreaming of me ~ Koren Zailckas

All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby. ~ John Green

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. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate road-house next door. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

He would learn to accept his defeat gracefully – unlike Gatsby
with the shotgun – and decide to get on with his life. ~ Laura Buzo