The Great Gatsby Quotes

I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool - Great Gatsby quote In Fool

All right…I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Daisy on her newborn girl. She is saying there is no hope for women to make a difference in early society, as they are not seen as intellectural figures in the early 1900s. Better for a woman to act dumb and naive and allow men take care of her, than trying to become strong and opionionated.

‘You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,’ she went on in a convinced way. ‘Everybody thinks so – the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. ‘Sophisticated – God, I’m sophisticated!’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Daisy is so unhappy with her life. She has everything and has done everything a person of her class would expect, but it has not made her life satisfying.

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Nick on Daisy, who seems to represent the hollow and morally bankrupt aspect of wealth during the 1920’s.

‘Did you give Nick a little heart-to-heart talk on the veranda?’ demanded Tom suddenly.
‘Did I?’ She looked at me. ‘I can’t seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know – ‘
‘Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,’ he advised me.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1. Tom Buchanan, his wife Daisy and Nick. This exchange depicts the unhappy and tense marriage that Daisy has with Tom, who seems worried that she has been airing their dirty laundry. Tom is verbally and emotionally abusive to Daisy.

He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, for Gatsby the green light at end of Daisy’s dock represents the American Dream and his dream of being reunited with Daisy, the woman he loves. It is a constantly recurring symbol in 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.

But above the gray 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 irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 2, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg is an ad that gazes down at the characters and all that happens in the valley of ashes. It symbolizes God looking down at the characters and the moral decay of the 1920s.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 2. While riding on the train to the city with Tom, Nick tells us that Tom uses the train stop to meet up with his mistress Myrtle Wilson for a night filled with drunkenness and violence. The ‘ashes’ description symbolizes the valley’s moral depravity and social decline.

Then I heard footsteps on the stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Nick’s description of Myrtle Wilson, focusing almost entirely on her body and her sensuousness. It is obvious Nick doesn’t see much in Myrtle as regards intellect or personality. An unhappily married woman, her husband George is depicted as a ghost whom she walks through to get her lover Tom Buchanan.

‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity – except his wife, who moved close to Tom.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1. 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.

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.

‘You see,’ cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. ‘It’s really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic, and they don’t believe in divorce.’
Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 2, Tom has invented this elaborate lie to to cover over the real reason he won’t divorce Daisy to marry Myrtle – class difference. Myrtle is not of his social class so he strings her along with lies.

I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 2. Nick portrays himself as torn between his disgust for the tainted, manipulative, high-class people he is mixing with and his enchantment with them.

It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I told him I’d have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 2, Myrtle telling the story of her first meeting with Tom. Twelve years into an unhappy marriage Myrtle sees the encounter as the beginning of a love story and a romantic escape. But to Tom Myrtle is less a person and more of a sexual object.

Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.
‘Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!’ shouted Mrs. Wilson. ‘I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai – ‘
Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 2, tempers flare at Gatsby’s party, fueled by the bootleg booze. Tom, a vicious brute, breaks the nose of the cheap and vulgar Myrtle.

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.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements, that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table – the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 3, it is ironic that Nick expresses his uncomfortableness since he – unlike Gatsby’s other guests – has been invited to attend the lavish party at Gatsby’s mansion.

‘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.
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