The Great Gatsby Quotes

‘Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.’
A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.
‘I don’t think it’s so much THAT,’ argued Lucille sceptically; ‘it’s more that he was a German spy during the war.’
One of the men nodded in confirmation.
‘I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,’ he assured us positively.
‘Oh, no,’ said the first girl, ‘it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.’ As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. ‘You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 3. Will the real Jay Gatsby please stand up? Gatsby is a mystery man, the master illusionist, and no one really knows who he is or how he got his money. At his lavish all-night parties his illusion is further fed by rumors and elaborate stories his guests tell about him.

‘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.

He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. 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. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 3. Nick is in awe on his first meeting with Gatsby, the American Dream personified. He is captivated by his new friend’s charming and charismatic personality, especially his smile, the kind of smile you only experience a few times in your life.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. 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, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 3. Nick Carraway is watching the party unfold in Myrtle’s Manhattan apartment. This passage illustrates the duality of city life: the clamor and the ‘constant flicker of men and women’ in the city that never sleeps, and on the other hand the vast loneliness that some people experience in the big city.

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.

He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American – that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness.
He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 4, Gatsby is impatient and restless, like the rest of America. It seems that no one in the 1920s there could wait patiently to fulfil their dreams.

He reached in his pocket and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell into my palm.
‘That’s the one from Montenegro.’
To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look.
Orderi di Danilo, ran the circular legend, Montenegro, Nicolas Rex.
‘Turn it.’
Major Jay Gatsby, I read, For Valour Extraordinary.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 4. On seeing Gatsby’s medal, Nick begins to believe and appreciate Gatsby and no longer just views him as a puffed-up fraud who bent and exaggerated the truth.

‘The old Metropole,’ brooded Mr. Wolfsheim gloomily. ‘Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there….they shot him three times in the belly and drove away..

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 4. Racketeer and Gatsby’s friend Meyer Wolfshiem describes to Nick the memory the Metropole holds. He treasures that horrible memory because it was the last one he had of his dear friend, who was murdered there.

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.

I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back, and I thought I’d never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a minute she’d look around uneasily, and say: ‘Where’s Tom gone?’ and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. It was touching to see them together – it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night, and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers, too, because her arm was broken – she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 4, Jordan Baker on the story of the aftermath of Daisy’s marriage. Post-honeymoon Daisy seems to be genuinely head-over-heels for Tom Buchanan. But the first half of this passage also hints that Daisy knows about Tom’s pattern of infidelity, which is confirmed in the second half. The chambermaid he seems to have had a fling with, like most of Tom’s women, also gets injured and suffers a broken arm.

‘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.

Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. It was when I asked you – do you remember? – if you knew Gatsby in West Egg. After you had gone home she came into my room and woke me up, and said: ‘What Gatsby?’ and when I described him – I was half asleep – she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man she used to know. It wasn’t until then that I connected this Gatsby with the officer in her white car.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 4. Jordan Baker relating the story of Daisy to Nick Carraway. And how she realized that Jay Gatsby was the young officer who before she married Tom watched her ‘in a way that every girl wants to be looked at’ – her former love.

When I said you were a particular friend of Tom’s, he started to abandon the whole idea. He doesn’t know very much about Tom, though he says he’s read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse of Daisy’s name.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 4. Jordan tells Nick that Gatsby wants Nick to invite Daisy to his house and let Gatsby come over. Gatsby has read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse of Daisy’s name, she says. He is devoted to, or obsessed with Daisy.
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