The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a short novel which takes place on Long Island during the Jazz Age and is commonly cited as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

• "...paid a high price for living too long with a single dream."

• "No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."

• "All right... I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."
  • Daisy (on her newborn girl)

• "Everyone 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."
  • Nick (on himself)

• "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning ——
  So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
  • Nick (on resilience)

• "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."
  • Nick (on Gatsby)

• "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. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself."
  • Nick (on Gatsby)

• "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 anyone,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'"
  • Nick

• "There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind..."
  • Nick (on Tom Buchanan)

• "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. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end."
  • Nick (on Gatsby)

• "'They are a rotten crowd,' I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.'"
  • Nick's last words to Gatsby