Best Quotes from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald with Page Numbers

'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,' 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.

This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the 'creative temperament'.

It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person.

Life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air.

This isn't just an epigram - life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.

Sophisticated - God, I'm sophisticated!

Indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

It is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.

Above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg.

The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high.

I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination to have my company bordered on violence.

It does her good to get away.

You see,' cried Catherine triumphantly. 'Neither of them can stand the person they're married to.

The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur.

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

'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.'

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

The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter.

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited.

He's just a man named Gatsby.

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

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.

He understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.

The fact was infinitely astonishing to him, and I recognized first the unusual quality of wonder.

I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

"The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world."

"Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge, I thought; ‘anything at all...‘ Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder."

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

"I don't want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you hear."

"He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour."

"He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American..."

"His smile comprehended Montenegro's troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people."

"But I like across the street better! Yes, highballs, agreed Gatsby..."

"You're a perfect gentleman."

"This is one of his sentimental days. He's quite a character around New York—a denizen of Broadway."

'Your place looks like the World's Fair.'

'I want to get the grass cut.'

'Don't be silly; it's just two minutes to four.'

'Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?'

'The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.'

'They're such beautiful shirts.'

'You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.'

'It makes me sad because I've never seen such-such beautiful shirts before.'

'What do you think of that? It's stopped raining.'

'No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.'

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.

His heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.

A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.

So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

I feel far away from her,' he said. 'It’s hard to make her understand.

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!'

I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before.

His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.

So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.

She blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

'You always look so cool.'

'Her voice is full of money.'

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

'What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?' cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?'

'You must be crazy!' exclaimed Tom automatically.

'She never loved you, do you hear?' he cried. 'She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me.'

'You don't understand,' said Gatsby, with a touch of panic. 'You're not going to take care of her any more.'

'I want to know what Mr. Gatsby has to tell me.'

'I can’t help what’s past.' She began to sob helplessly. 'I did love him once—but I loved you too.'

'I want to speak to Daisy alone,' he insisted.

‘You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.'

I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared.

He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

It was a cold fall day, with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed.

They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another.

He experienced a profound moment, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.

There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms.

He found her excitingly desirable.

She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force-of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality.

In any case, it was just personal.

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 further.

And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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

I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person.

He had a big future before him, you know. He was only a young man, but he had a lot of brain power here.

Jimmy always liked it better down East. He rose up to his position in the East.

He knew he had a big future in front of him.

I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.