Great Gatsby Book Quotes

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

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

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures. ~ 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

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

One thing's sure and nothing surer. The rich get richer and the poor get- children ~ Ron Rash

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. 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. It faced
or seemed to face
the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. 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. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love. ~ Tom Perrotta

I want to write something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.
As usual,
F. Scott Fitzgerald ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think everyone has some sort of connection to Gatsby as a character ... he's created himself according to his own emotions and dreams and lifted himself by his bootstraps from a poor kid in the Midwest and created this image that is The Great Gatsby and it's a truly American story in that regard. ~ Leonardo DiCaprio

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

I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Everyone suspects themselves of at least one of the cardinal virtues ... ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge, anything at all ... ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven-a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax. ~ 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

And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby ~ Azar Nafisi

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

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

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

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

I would love it if anyone gave me the job of adapting 'The Great Gatsby,' but nobody ever does. ~ Andrew Davies

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

Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald