The Great Gatsby Quotes
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Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby was symbolic and manifest of all the pre-crash hubris and prosperity that engulfed America at the time. The following quotes are intended to highlight and explicate some of the key themes and reveal something of the characters in The Great Gatsby.

Page 7 "Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope."

Page 8 "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."

Page 9 "The Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe"

Page 9 "I was…a pathfinder, an original settler."

Page 10 "To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their (W/E Egg) dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size."

Page 12 "It was a body (Tom’s) capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body."

Page 18 "’Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?’"

Page 18 "The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved." — Tom

Page 18 "[us whites] who are the dominant race" — Tom

Page 22 "I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything…Sophisticated — God, I’m sophisticated!" — Daisy

Page 26 "This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat…"

Page 32 "everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it"

Page 47 "What realism! Knew when to stop, too — didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?"

Page 48 "I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound."

Page 63 "I’ll tell you God’s truth" — Gatsby

Page 92 "The rich get richer and the poor get — children."

Page 92 "There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — no through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion…"

Page 95 "The truth was that Jay Gatsby…sprang from his Platonic conception of himself."

Page 95 "He was a son of God…and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty."

Page 100-101 "It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment."

Page 106 "Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!" — Gatsby

Page 107 "when he…wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God."

Page 108 "his [Gatsby] career as Trimalchio was over."

Page 113 "What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? Cried Daisy, and the day after that, and the next thirty years?"

Page 115 "Her voice is full of money"

Page 118 "It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well."

Page 142 "He had committed himself to the following of a grail."

Page 142 "Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor"

Page 146 "’They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’"

Page 147 "his incorruptible dream" (vs. Gatsby’s corruption)

Page 155-156 "I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone."

Page 170 "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…"

Page 171 "I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

Page 167 "After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eye’s power of correction."

Page 172 "tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further…And on fine morning - / So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Other Notes in this Category

1. Death of a Salesman
2. Heart of Darkness : Joseph Conrad
3. Helena and Hermia's Relationship in Midsummer Night's Dream
4. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
5. Quotes From Down The Mountaintop — M. Walker
6. Quotes From Toni Morrison — Linden Peach
7. Quotes from An Instant in the Wind - André Brink
8. Quotes from La Chat 1990 Interview With Brink
9. Quotes from Tar Baby - Toni Morrison
10. Quotes from The Limits of Wonder - Richard Lehan
11. The Great Gatsby Quotes
12. Wuthering Heights - Chapter 7 Volume 2

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