QUOTES FROM THE GREAT GATSBY ABOUT GATSBY

“He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it”

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us”

“Can’t repeat the past?… Why of course you can!”

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him”

“He had an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again”

“No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams”

“His mansion represented what he stood for; it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy”

“If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock”

“Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay”

“He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase ‘educated at Oxford,’ or swallowed it or choked on it as though it had bothered him before”

“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself”

“I thought you inherited your money.”

“I did, old sport,” he said automatically, “but I lost most of it in the big panic—the panic of the war”

“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…” INSPIRATIONAL MEANINGFUL SISTER QUOTES

“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…”

“Her voice is full of money”

“He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.’ After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken”

“He smiled with a sort of agonized gaiety and told her how old Dan Cody took him in his yacht”

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

“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”

“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”

“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”

“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”

“It excited him [Gatsby] too that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes”

“His determination to have [Daisy] actualized all my wonderings about him into a most immediate and oddly impersonal compass”

“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”