Book of Quotes

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

- "I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

- "The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly."

- "Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away."

- "And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

- "And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy."

- "He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was 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 eternal 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, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."

- "I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity."

- "Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead."

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

- "You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me."

- "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired."

- "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 any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

- "Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope."

- "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."

- "Can't repeat the past?...Why of course you can!"

- "They're a rotten crowd', I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."

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

- "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."

- "I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. 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."

- "It's a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people."

- "All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever."