Jordan Baker Quotes

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end 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. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it – indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Nick acknowledges Jordan Baker’s egotism and conceit with an astonished tribute.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, description of Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker. The two are so lightweight that they appear to be floating, the imagery suggests that the characters live restless, dissatisfied and hollow lives. They dress in white, symbol of purity, but that may be seen as ironic because of their own corruption. The tranquility of the scene is disrupted by Tom Buchanan who abruptly shuts the windows with a ‘boom’, suggesting trouble in paradise and Tom’s violent nature.

Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the ‘Saturday Evening Post’ – the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1. Nick pays close attention to Jordan’s placement and posture, as she reads from the couch, suggesting that he may be developing an interest in her.

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.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1, Nick eyes Jordan Baker, a professional golfer of some fame. We see his immediate physical attraction to her so it comes as no surprise that he becomes romantically involved. But in keeping with the valley of ashes theme, Jordan’s gray eyes suggest something hidden about this woman who cheats at golf and also bends the truth.

Her (Jordan) gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. I’d been writing letters once a week and signing them: ‘Love, Nick,’ and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 3, Nick describes his relationship with Jordan, whom he thinks he is in love with. At the same time he is telling his ‘girl’ back home that he loves her.
I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away - F. Scott Fitzgerald quote In New York

I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it – overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7. Jordan, to Nick and Tom in the car ride to New York City. The city represents the high-life lived by the novel’s characters who want a good time and sometimes taking it too far, like Tom and Myrtle who are having an affair and cheating on their spouses.

Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age….So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7. Nick is struck with loneliness as it dawns on him that it’s his 30th birthday. He fears the new decade will bring him isolation and he is also aware of his own mortality. Jordan comforts him. Unlike Daisy and Gatsby who look back to the past, he and Jordan look to the future.

‘I’ve left Daisy’s house,’ she said. ‘I’m at Hempstead and I’m going down to Southampton this afternoon.’
Probably it had been tactful to leave Daisy’s house, but the act annoyed me and her next remark made me rigid.
‘You weren’t so nice to me last night.’
‘How could it have mattered then?’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8. Following Myrtle’s tragic death, Jordan Baker’s casual, devil-may-care attitude is no longer attractive to Nick. In fact he is disgusted that she is so unaffected by Myrtle’s death, and all she is concerned about from the previous day is that Nick wasn’t attentive enough to her.

‘You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.’
‘I’m thirty,’ I said. ‘I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 9, When Nick breaks up with Jordan, she accuses him of being dishonest and disingenuously leading her on.
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