The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, the novel depicts narrator Nick Carraway’s interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby’s obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. Profoundly inspirational Great Gatsby quotes will encourage growth in life, make you wiser and broaden your perspective.
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Famous Great Gatsby Quotes
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I hope she’ll be a fool that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. Fitzgerald F. Scott
My dear, most of these fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet and when she gave me the bill you’d of thought she had my appendix out. F. Scott Fitzgerald
And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy. F. Scott Fitzgerald
The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft mindedness, and, suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money. F. Scott Fitzgerald
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. F. Scott Fitzgerald
She’s got an indiscreet voice, I remarked. It’s full of I hesitated. Her voice is full of money, Gatsby said suddenly. 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
She wanted her life shaped now, immediately and the decision must be made by some force of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality that was close at hand. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. F. Scott Fitzgerald
You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry. F. Scott Fitzgerald
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired. F. Scott Fitzgerald
At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life. F. Scott Fitzgerald
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve ha Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. F. Scott Fitzgerald
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. F. Scott Fitzgerald
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. F. Scott Fitzgerald
They’re a rotten crowd, I shouted across the lawn. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together. F. Scott Fitzgerald
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. F. Scott Fitzgerald
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. F. Scott Fitzgerald
You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy, I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. Can’t you talk about crops or something? F. Scott Fitzgerald
I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. 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. F. Scott Fitzgerald
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. F. Scott Fitzgerald
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams not 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, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. F. Scott Fitzgerald
It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I hope she’ll be a fool that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. 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
Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. F. Scott Fitzgerald
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. F. Scott Fitzgerald
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life. F. Scott Fitzgerald
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. 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. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. F. Scott Fitzgerald
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. F. Scott Fitzgerald
For a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires. F. Scott Fitzgerald
He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man. F. Scott Fitzgerald
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. F. Scott Fitzgerald
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Oh, you want too much! she cried to Gatsby. I love you now isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past. Daisy began to sob helplessly. I did love him once but I loved you too. 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
They had never been closer in their month of love nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep. F. Scott Fitzgerald
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind. F. Scott Fitzgerald
He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs. 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
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. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it! F. Scott Fitzgerald
It excited him too that many men had already loved Daisy it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions. F. Scott Fitzgerald
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. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t, because she was in love with me too. Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do? F. Scott Fitzgerald
If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget a singing compulsion, a whispered Listen, a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. F. Scott Fitzgerald
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees just as things grow in fast movies I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. F. Scott Fitzgerald
She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. F. Scott Fitzgerald
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me. 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
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. F. Scott Fitzgerald
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I couldn’t forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. F. Scott Fitzgerald
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. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Can’t repeat the past?Why of course you can! F. Scott Fitzgerald
Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For awhile these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. F. Scott Fitzgerald
I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and 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
You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow, she went on in a convinced way. Everybody thinks so the most advanced people. And I know I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. Sophisticated God, I’m sophisticated! F. Scott Fitzgerald
A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. 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
