Great Gatsby Money Quotes

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; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1. Although Gatsby represents everything that Nick hates and he sees him as low-class, he exempts him for it because Gatsby was born poor and worked for his money.

I lived at West Egg, the – well, the least 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 that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard … My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires – all for eighty dollars a month.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Nick is wealthy enough to live in West Egg but not wealthy enough to rent a very nice place. But though he may live in a small house, he does get to live beside millionaires.

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. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, East Egg has mostly people who come from old money, or were born into their riches. Unlike the West Egg inhabitants who are mostly members of the nouveau riche, people who worked their way into their riches.

Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it – I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Nick on the Buchanans. Our introduction to Tom and Daisy right away describes them as rich, bored and privileged. Tom is restless, indulging in affairs, and Daisy is burdoned down with the knowledge of those affairs. This restlessness and resentment places them straight on the path to the tragedy at the end of the novel.

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.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 2. The valley of ashes symbolizes the moral and social decay resulting from the unhindered pursuit of wealth. It is where the rich indulge themselves in the total pursuit of their own pleasure. It represents absolute poverty, hopelessness and spiritual and moral barrenness – a place of gray desolation.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 2. In the valley of ashes, there is a thick veil of gray dust that makes it look as if everything is made out of it. Especially George Wilson, who is wears his sadness and desolation like a gray suit. His wife Myrtle is having an affair with Tom Buchanan.

There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and he champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his motor-boats slid the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 3, on the wealthy Gatsby’s home and guests. The culture of wealth-worship and materialism is one of the central themes of the novel. Nowhere is that more evident than at Gatsby’s lavish parties, which people are drawn to by their sheer spectacle and Gatsby’s money and wealth.

‘I like to come,’ Lucille said. ‘I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked me my name and address – inside of a week I got a package from Croirier’s with a new evening gown in it.’
‘Did you keep it?’ asked Jordan.
‘Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 3. Jordan’s friend Lucille McKee appears more impressed with the price of the gown than the gown itself. She is typical of the kind of careless wealthy people who throw money around like it is just paper.

‘See!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. 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?’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 3. Owl-eyed man in Gatsby’s library gives one of first hints that Gatsby is a fraud. He expresses surprise that Gatsby’s books are real, not fake, as he had expected. He had thought the books would be ‘a nice durable cardboard’, giving the illusion of a library where none existed. Gatsby’s life is all for show, he has a library filled with books that have never been read, making him seem more cultured than he really is. While Gatsby can buy the things that rich people have, he can’t buy the education or experience.

I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people – with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 4, Meyer Wolfsheim fixing the World Series is a crime that appalls Nick. But while the burglar gets caught, Wolfsheim uses his wealth and underworld contacts to stay clean.

By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 4, Daisy was more focused on money in her marriage to Tom Buchanan, who gave her a $350K string of pearls.

‘Here, deares’. She groped around in a waste-basket she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. ‘Take ’em down-stairs and give ’em back to whoever they belong to. Tell ’em all Daisy’s change’ her mind. Say: ‘Daisy’s change’ her mine!’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 4, Daisy knows the expensive string of pearls Tom gave her is about to become a chain and changes her mind about marrying Tom Buchanan. When drunk she wants to marry the man she really loves, Jay Gatsby. But then she sobers up and in the cold light of day she does what she was born to do: marry the rich man – Tom.

He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think 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. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 5. Gatsby is blinded by love. A man who places a great importance on his wealth and material possessions, these now pale in comparison to the woman he loves.

‘I thought you inherited your money.’
‘I did, old sport,’ he said automatically, ‘but I lost most of it in the big panic – the panic of the war.’
I think he hardly knew what he was saying, for when I asked him what business he was in he answered, ‘That’s my affair,’ before he realized that it wasn’t the appropriate reply.
‘Oh, 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.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 5, Gatsby initially claimed that he inherited his money when his family died, but slips up here when speaking to Nick. He is not a good liar. To Nick that makes him a lot more honest than half the people who come to his parties.

Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the think folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 5, Gatsby is like a peacock flaunting his wealth to Daisy and showing off his shirts he has sent to him from England. Materialistic Daisy realizes she made a mistake in marrying Tom for his money, not being aware that one day Gatsby the man she loved would also be rich.

She was appalled by West Egg…by its raw vigor that chafed…and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6. Daisy is appalled at Gatsby’s party, because coming from East Egg where the old money lives, she looks down on the new money that lives in West Egg. She is shallow and reluctant to be part of anything outside of her social class.

‘I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out….Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 7, Tom Buchanan’s statement is hypocritical because he is cheating himself. He describes Gatsby as a nobody who wants to be somebody – all the money in the world couldn’t make Gatsby worth Daisy. Tom also reveals his own racist views.

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately – and the decision must be made by some force – of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality – that was close at hand.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 8, Daisy is ready to settle down and her ‘artificial world’ is about to be taken over by Tom. She sees in him a life she is accustomed to, he is wealthy, secure and in control.

‘They’re a rotten crowd,’ I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’
I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 8, Nick, speaking to Gatsby right before he dies, points out that wealth and class mean nothing in terms of character.

There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other with little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water.

It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 8, Nick’s description of the scene of the murder, when Gatsby’s body is discovered. The language suggests that for all of his wealth and infamy, he he never quite made the impact that he had wished. He was a little ripple in a large pool called America. In death he was reduced to just a ‘thin red circle in the water.’ Gatsby’s murder and the discovery of the body of Wilson, who killed him, symbolize the death of Gatsby’s dream.

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.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 9, Nick’s moral indictment of the Buchanans, who are corrupted by their wealth and perception of things. Ignorant to what is going on in the world around them, they refuse to have any guilt for their reckless behavior. While Myrtle, George and Gatsby have all died, Nick observes that the Buchanans are not punished at all for their recklesness and can simply retreat back into their money. They are portrayed at people with no morals or religion or God.
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