Great Gatsby Gatsby Quotes

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

A literary fetish is the new black ~ Danielle Ganek

Rich girls don't marry poor boys, Jay Gatsby ~ 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

...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

The third boat was quite pretty, too ... this one was an Adirondack fishing boat, and even though it was only half finished, I could picture Jay Gatsby in it, casting a line over the side while he yearned for that shallow tramp, Daisy. ~ Kristan Higgins

Gatsby looked at Daisy in a way that every young girl wanted to be looked at ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

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

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

Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one – Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Jay Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennet, Scarlet O'Hara, Dill and Scout, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot – were more real than the real people I knew. ~ Anna Quindlen

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

Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

My courage is faith
faith in the eternal resilience of me
that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide
not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often
and the female hell is deadlier than the male. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

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 was very new to working in front of the camera when I started shooting 'Gatsby', so I set myself the mission of gleaning as much information as possible out of the much more experienced actors. The cast was astoundingly talented. ~ Elizabeth Debicki

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

forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath ~ 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

If it had been easy for Romeo to get to Juliet, nobody would have cared. Same goes for Cyrano and Don Quixote and Gatsby and their respective paramours. What captures the imagination is watching men throw themselves at a brick wall over and over again, and wondering if this is the time that they won't be able to get back up. ~ Jodi Picoult

No girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it's every girl for herself. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

<>, me dijo, <>. ~ 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

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

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

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