The Great Gatsby quotes

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’

— Spoken by a character · I

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

— Spoken by a character · VIII

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”

— Spoken by a character · IV

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

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 …

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.

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.

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.

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he suggested.

— Spoken by a character · IX

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.