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.'

In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me.

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.

There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

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

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America.

I had that familiar conviction that 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.

Everything will be alright in the end. If it’s not alright, it’s not the end.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river.

But above the grey land...you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg.

His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular cafes with her.

I think he'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon.

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

The only crazy I was, was when I married him.

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

I saw him too, looking up and wondering.

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

You have to keep after them all the time.

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

I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry.

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked around and smiled.

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

At small parties there isn't any privacy.

The laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.

There's something funny about a fellow that'll do a thing like that; he doesn't want any trouble with anybody.

I thought you knew, old sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good host.

He urged me on, and I felt as though he had precisely the impression of me that, at my best, I hoped to convey.

As I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over.

'I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West—all dead now.'

'I'm going to make a big request of you today,' he said, so I thought you ought to know something about me.

'He has to telephone,' said Mr Wolfshiem, following him with his eyes. 'Fine fellow, isn't he? Handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman.'

'Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge,' I thought; 'anything at all...'

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

'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.'

'There's the kind of man you'd like to take home and introduce to your mother and sister.'

'It was a pleasure to find I had discovered a man of fine breeding after I talked with him an hour.'

'I can't forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there.'

'He wants to know if you'll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over.'

"A large open car was coming up the drive."

"It was a terrible mistake," he said, shaking his head from side to side, "a terrible, terrible mistake."

"I've got my hands full," I said. "I'm much obliged but I couldn't take on any more work."

"I don't think so," she said innocently. "Why?"

"Nobody's coming to tea. It's too late!"

"It’s stopped raining."

"I've been in several things," he corrected himself. "I was in the drug business and then I was in the oil business. But I'm not in either one now."

"I love it, but I don't see how you live there all alone."

"Do you like it?"

"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 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.

Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace.

An instinct toward his future glory had led him... to the small Lutheran College of St Olaf's in southern Minnesota.

He was left with his singularly appropriate education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man.

I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

At least they are more interesting than the people we know.

You can't repeat the past.

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

'It was better that the shock should all come at once.'

'Her voice is full of money,' he said suddenly.

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

'You know I love you,' she murmured.

'You always look so cool,' she repeated.

'What a low, vulgar girl!' 'I don't care!' cried Daisy.

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

'I told you what's been going on,' said Gatsby.

'I'm going to take better care of you from now on.'

'I can't stand this any more.'

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

'He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn't realize just how extraordinary a 'nice' girl could be.'

'In any case, it was just personal.'

'I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport.'

'What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?'

'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.'

'It was a cold fall day, with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his arm a little...'

'I suppose she’ll call too.' He looked at me anxiously, as if he hoped I'd corroborate this.

'He couldn't possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn't bear to shake him free.'

'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.'

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

'Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.'

'And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.'

'He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.'

'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 is dead.'

'If he'd of lived, he'd of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He'd of helped build up the country.'

'The poor son-of-a-bitch.'

'I couldn't get to the house,' he remarked. 'Neither could anybody else.'