Gatsby: Quotes to Know

"...he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body" (Fitzgerald 7).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: Tom Buchanan

"About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. 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" (Fitzgerald 23).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: Valley of Ashes

"I lived at West Egg, the— well, less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places.... The one on my right was a colossal affair....It was Gatsby's mansion. Or, rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby, it was...inhibited by a gentleman of that name" (Fitzgerald 5).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: West Egg for new money

"I live at West Egg." "Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named Gatsby's. Do you know of him?" "I live next door to him." "Well they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's where all his money comes from...I'm scared of him. I'd hate to have him get anything on me." (Fitzgerald 32).

speaker: Catherine (Myrtle's sister) and Nick Carraway referencing: Jay Gatsby

"Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything." Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter. "Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?...It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less that an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and I asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, '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'" (Fitzgerald 17).

speaker: Daisy Buchanan and Nick Carraway referencing: disillusionment and unhappiness

"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. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour" (Fitzgerald 9).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: Daisy Buchanan

"He was a blond, spiritless man, anemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes" (Fitzgerald 25).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: George Wilson

"...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" (Fitzgerald 2).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: Jay Gatsby

"...a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. 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 decided to call to him....But I didn't call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward— and distinguished nothing except a single green light...that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness" (Fitzgerald 20-21).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: Jay Gatsby

"I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come (Daisy's phone call), and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees" (Fitzgerald 161).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: Jay Gatsby and his disillusionment with Daisy

"I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small- breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before" (Fitzgerald 11).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: Jordan Baker

"The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her and of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall" (Fitzgerald 8).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: Jordan Baker

"...the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering. She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye" (Fitzgerald 25-26).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: Myrtle Wilson

"It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals...they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size" (Fitzgerald 4-5).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: West and East Egg society

"They were here and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening, too, would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself" (Fitzgerald 12).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: disappointment and inauthenticity of Jordan and Daisy

"The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground" (Fitzgerald 23-24).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg

"Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I'd known Tom in college" (Fitzgerald 5).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: family connection to Daisy Buchanan

"My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations....I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I became restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business" (Fitzgerald 3).

speaker: Nick Carraway referencing: his family background

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Colored Empires' by this man Goddard?...it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved." "Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them." "Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things" (Fitzgerald 12-13).

speaker: Tom and Daisy Buchanan referencing: disillusionment and supremacy