Gatsby Quotes

“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls

“I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls

“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 external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.”
― F Scott Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

“And so we beat on, books against the critics, borne back ceaslessly into rewrites.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. ”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“He wanted something agreeable, something sweeter around the edges, but I was never very good at sweet.”
― Nghi Vo, The Chosen and the Beautiful

“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, The Great Gatsby

“I'm p-paralyzed with happiness." - She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had.”
― F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“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, The Half Brother

“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

“forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Jay would return to New York one day. When he did, he would make something of himself--not by way of luck or happenstance, but by means of his own industry. One day he would make New York his own. This indisputabe fact was his inescapable destiny. Only, he wasn't quite ready for that--not yet.”
― R.M. Spencer, Agent Gatz: A Great Gatsby Prequel

“Así seguimos, golpeándonos, barcas contracorriente, devueltos sin cesar al pasado.”
― Francis Scott Fitzgerald

“Pero hubo un cambio en Gatsby que era simplemente incomprensible. Literalmente resplandecía; sin necesidad de palabra o gesto alguno de emoción, un nuevo bienestar irradiaba de él y llenaba la pequeña habitación.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Gatsby's fall from grace may be grim, but the language of the novel is buoyant; Fitzgerald's plot may suggest that the American Dream is a mirage, but his words make that dream irresistible.”
― Maureen Corrigan, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures

“She sat there, a wild heart on a chair with gin lips and nightlife eyes. The Gatsby Girl. Longing for more in the shallowness of it all.”
― Marie-Kristin Hofmann, Remember the wild girl

“He came back from France when Tom and Daisy were still on their wedding trip, and made a miserable but irresistible journey to Louisville on the last of his army pay. He stayed there 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. Just as Daisy's house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.

He left feeling that if he had searched harder he might have found her—that he was leaving her behind. The day-coach—he was penniless now—was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a folding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street.

The track curved and now it was going away from the sun which, as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Assim vamos remando, barcos a navegar contra a correnteza, incessantemente levados de volta ao passado”
― F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: The classic American novel about love lost and the impossible dream, now in an expanded, deluxe Edition with illustrations & selected contemporary critical responses

“Every year, when we finished Gatsby, I read the last page aloud. Also, every year, I wept... I almost looked forward to it. Crying once a year is probably necessary... it was involuntary, almost external, like being rained on, a nourishment, and it made me glad that I could feel that deeply, or had once.”
― Holly LeCraw, The Half Brother

“Gatsby, her yıl önümüzde biraz daha gerileyen o yeşil ışığa, o bel-getirici geleceğe inanıyordu. Kaçırdık o vakit elimizden onu, ama ziyanı yok, yarın daha hızlı koşacak, kollarımızı daha ilerilere uzatacağız... Ve bir sabah, aydınlıklar içinde...
O ümitledir ki şimdi sefer etmekteyiz, biz o akıntıya karşı giden tekneler, durmadan geriye, geçmişe çarpılıp atılsak da ne gam...”
― F. Scott Fiztgerald

“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, The Masquerade

“He is a creature of will, and the beauty of his will overreaches the tawdriness of his real object: Daisy.”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays

“I had never understood what Eliot meant by the curious phrase ‘objective correlative’ until the scene in Gatsby where the almost comically sinister Meyer Wolfsheim, who has just been introduced, displays his cuff links and explain that they are ‘the finest specimens of human molars.’ Get it? Got it. That’s what Eliot meant (109).”
― Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

“You're some East Coast thing, aren't you? Sharp and mean and cold. What a prize you are.”
― Nghi Vo

“«Signora, le posso parlare un attimo?» [...] C'era un problema con Gatsby. Lo diceva per il mio bene. Per il mio bene? Che strana espressione. Con tutto il rispetto che aveva nei miei riguardi [...] aveva una lamentela da fare. Contro chi, e perché a me? Contro Gatsby. Gli domandai se avesse per caso sporto una formale denuncia contro il signor Gatsby, e gli rammentai che in ogni caso sarebbe stato inutile, dato che la morte estingue il reato.
Ma c'era poco da scherzare. «No, professoressa, non contro il signor Gatsby; contro il romanzo». Era immorale. Insegnava ai giovani le cose sbagliate; avvelenava la loro mente - dovevo essermene senz'altro accorta anch'io. Veramente no, gli dissi. Gli rammentai che Gatsby era un'opera di narrativa, non un manuale di istruzioni per la vita. Di sicuro mi rendevo conto, insistette, che c'era chi prendeva a modello quei romanzi e quei personaggi. Forse il signor Gatsby andava bene per gli americani, ma non per la nostra gioventù rivoluzionaria. [...]
Per Nyazi fra la realtà di tutti i giorni e quella immaginata da Fitzgerald non c'era differenza. Il grande Gatsby era un'opera emblematica, parlava dell'America, e l'America per noi era come il veleno. Era così e basta. Dovevamo insegnare agli studenti iraniani a combattere l'immoralità americana. Era serissimo, e in assoluta buona fede.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Gatsby is constantly being made and remade by others.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“He knew his mind would never again be free to romp like the mind of god”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“All of them want to be the people in the book. They’d rather be that than themselves. You’ve turned all the monsters into nice people.’
G. Isaac reeled of some of Chacko’s lines from the book, which didn’t help to ameliorate the confusion. The moment that is immortalized in my mind is G. Isaac in my mother’s school sports ground, airily quoting Chacko airily quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald with absolutely no context, to my completely bewildered British publisher and literary agent.
‘You know Gatsby turned out all right in the end. It is what preyed on him, the foul dust that foated in the wake of his dreams . . .’
When he didn’t manage to initiate an interesting conversation with them, G.  Isaac made his plump, cheerful way into the audience and sat in one of the middle rows. Mrs Roy was already onstage, deep in conversation with Kamala Das, and had still not noticed him.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me