Great Gatsby Characteristic Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can imagine Herman Melville coming to his publisher with his new manuscript. They ask him what it's about, and he says, 'It's about a one-legged captain who's had his leg bitten off by a whale.' It wouldn't have sounded that promising. Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby, he was told you couldn't write seriously about a bootlegger. If a man cares intensely enough about tiddley winks, his book about tiddley winks ill be a great novel. ~ Matthew J. Bruccoli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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