Quotes in The Great Gatsby
As you read these, consider what they reveal about character, setting and theme.
“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 fool”
Daisy talking about her daughter
“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
Gatsby talking to Nick
“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.”
Nick talking about Gatsby
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.”
- Nick Carraway
“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”
- Jay Gatsby
“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
- Nick Carraway
Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to him, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted things had diminished by one.”
- Nick Carraway
“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.”
- Nick Carraway
“Her voice is full of money,”
- Gatsby talking about Daisy
“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 Carraway
“The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.”
- Nick Carraway describing Daisy's voice
“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.
- Tom Bucahanan
“This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.”
- Nick Carraway
“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.”
- Nick describing Gatsby as he is showing Daisy around his house
“He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.”
- Nick describing the owl-eyed man
“The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.”
- Nick Carraway
“God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!”
- George Wilson to Myrtle Wilson
This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too — didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”
The owl-eyed man talking about Gatsby. Belasco was a famous playwright
“Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”
- Nick describing Gatsby and Daisy's first kiss
'It makes me sad because I've never seen such - such beautiful shirts before.”
- Daisy Buchanan
“A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.”
- Nick describing Tom and Daisy's house