Great Gatsby Nick Quotes

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

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'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

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

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

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

Authors whose books were selected as ASEs were rewarded with a loyal readership of millions of men. Word spread quickly about the titles that were perennial favorites, even reaching the home front. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which was written in 1925, was considered a failure during Fitzgerald's lifetime. But when this book was printed as an ASE in October 1945, it won the hearts of an army of men. Their praise reverberated back home, and The Great Gatsby was rescued from obscurity and has since become an American literary classic. ~ Molly Guptill Manning

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

[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

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

I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and riding smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. ~ 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

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

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

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

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 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

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures. ~ 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

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

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

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

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