Great Gatsby Important Quotes

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

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'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 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

A sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

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

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is perfect in the same way that The Great Gatsby is perfect. Take a pencil and read these books, looking for something that doesn't sound right, something you'd want to change. You'll leave the page untouched. ~ William McKeen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

One of my favourite books of all time: 'The Great Gatsby'. I just think it's so well written. ~ Danielle De Niese

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

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

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

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 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] is a tour de force of revision. So much so that critics, who rarely mention the edit of a book, commented on the quality of Gatsby's rewriting, not just its writing, in reviews. For H. L. Mencken, the novel had 'a careful and brilliant finish. ... There is evidence in every line of hard work and intelligent effort. ... The author wrote, tore up, rewrote, tore up again. There are pages so artfully contrived that one can no more imagine improvising them than one can imagine improvising a fugue.' ... Careful, sound, carefully written, hard effort, wrote and rewrote, artfully contrived not improvised, structure, discipline: all these terms refer, however obliquely, not to the initial act of inspiration, but to editing.
Organization and clarity do not dominate the writing process. At some point, though, a writer must pull coherence from confusion, illuminate what lives in shadow, shade what shines too brightly. Gatsby is the cat's meow case study of crossing what Michael Ondaatje calls 'that seemingly uncrossable gulf between an early draft of a book ... and a finished product' - in other words, editing. ~ Susan Bell

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

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

He's just a man names Gatsby. ~ 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

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

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

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

It's pathetic, but I don't really remember my first time reading 'The Great Gatsby.' I must have read it in high school. I'm pretty sure I remember it being assigned, and I generally did the reading. But I don't remember having a reaction to the book, even though I loved literature, and other works made a lasting impression on me at that age. ~ Susan Choi

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

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

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

I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby' and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss. ~ Hugh Hefner

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

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