Jay Gatsby is the title character of the 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby. Profoundly inspirational Jay Gatsby quotes will encourage growth in life, make you wiser and broaden your perspective.
Famous Jay Gatsby Quotes
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
I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host. Jay Gatsby
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
Just tell him the truth that you never loved him and it’s all wiped out forever. Jay Gatsby
I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.
It was in nineteen nineteen, I only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man. Jay Gatsby
He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a handle
If there’s anything that you want, just ask for it, old sport. Jay Gatsby,
James Gatz that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior.
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. Jay Gatsby
Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. Jay Gatsby
Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.
I thought you ought to know something about my life. ought to know something about me. I didn’t want you to think I was just some nobody. Jay Gatsby
I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited they went there.
I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me. Jay Gatsby
I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all.
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. 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 external 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
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. 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
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. F. Scott Fitzgerald
He hurried the phrase educated at Oxford, or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him now. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him, after all.
The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his platonic conception of himself. F. Scott Fitzgerald
He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.
It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy it increased her value in his eyes. F. Scott Fitzgerald
He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea for so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an over wound clock.
He had 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
But it wasn’t a coincidence at all Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay
I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Nick Carraway
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, 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 blue 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, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees he could climb it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder
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
