The Great Gatsby Quotes

‘Who wants to go to town?’ demanded Daisy insistently. Gatsby’s eyes floated toward her. ‘Ah,’ she cried, ‘you look so cool.’
Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.
‘You always look so cool,’ she repeated.
She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a long time ago.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 7, Daisy’s confession of love for Gatsby. Though they don’t speak of love aloud, it is clear to Daisy’s husband Tom from their behavior that Daisy and Gatsby are having an affair – much like Tom is.

‘About Gatsby! No, I haven’t. I said I’d been making a small investigation of his past.’
‘And you found he was an Oxford man,’ said Jordan helpfully.
‘An Oxford man!’ He was incredulous. ‘Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7. Tom Buchanan believes that wealth alone can’t make somebody fit into the upper echelons of society, they need to be educated as well. He laughs at the suggestion Gatsby studied at Oxford, because he doesn’t wear the right clothes.

I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before – and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 7, Nick makes the connection between Tom and George, in that their wives are cheating. But the dividing line between the men is that Tom blames Gatsby for driving his wife away, while Wilson blames himself for allowing Myrtle to have an affair with another man to the point where he is physically sick.
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.

‘By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.’
‘Yes – I went there.’
Pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting: ‘You must have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven.’
Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice but, the silence was unbroken by his ‘thank you.’ and the soft closing of the door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.
‘I told you I went there,’ said Gatsby.
‘I heard you, but I’d like to know when.’
‘It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 7, in this confrontation between Tom and Gatsby, Tom attacks his education and calls him out as not being an Oxford man. It shows Tom’s condescending attitude towards what he views as Gatsby’s lesser education and 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.

‘You’re crazy!’ he exploded. ‘I can’t speak about what happened five years ago, because I didn’t know Daisy then – and I’ll be damned if I see how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the back door. But all the rest of that’s a God damned lie. Daisy loved me when she married me and she loves me now.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 7, Tom Buchanan to Gatsby, accusing him of lying about Daisy’s love and assuring him that Daisy loved him, Tom.

‘I never loved him,’ she said, with perceptible reluctance.
‘Not at Kapiolani?’ demanded Tom suddenly.
‘No.’
From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were drifting up on hot waves of air.
‘Not that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your shoes dry?” There was a husky tenderness in his tone. ‘…Daisy?’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7. After Gatsby confronts Tom Buchanan to say that his wife loves him Gatsby and not her husband, Daisy Buchanan declares that she never loved Tom.

‘I found out what your “drug-stores’ were.” He turned to us and spoke rapidly. ‘He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.’
‘What about it?’ said Gatsby politely. ‘I guess your friend Walter Chase wasn’t too proud to come in on it.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7. When Gatsby tells Tom that Daisy wants to end their marriage and run away with him, Tom goes on the attack. Gatsby is caught out lying, but he doesn’t care. As he sees it, everyone is involved in some kind of deception, including Tom’s pals.

With every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 7, after the heated confrontation between Gatsby and Tom that afternoon, Gatsby defends himself to Daisy. But his attempt to win her back fails – his American Dream – Daisy – is dead.

‘You two start on home, Daisy,’ said Tom. ‘In Mr. Gatsby’s car.’
She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.
‘Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7. Tom Buchanan allows Daisy to ride home with Gatsby because he no longer feels threatened. He knows Daisy will never leave him for Gatsby, even after all Tom has done to her and how much effort Gatsby puts in and how much he loves her.

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.

Michaelis and this man reached her first, but when they had torn open her shirtwaist, still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored for so long.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 7, the description of Myrtle Wilson’s physical state after she is knocked down by a car and killed is eerie and ghastly.

Some man was talking to him in a low voice and attempting from time to time to lay a hand on his shoulder, but Wilson neither heard nor saw. His eyes would drop slowly from the swinging light to the laden table by the wall and then jerk back to the light again and he gave out incessantly his high horrible call.
‘O, my Ga-od! O, my Ga-od! Oh, Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od!’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7. George Wilson is devastated by the death of his wife Myrtle. He is completely inconsolable and removed from reality, rocking himself back and forth and muttering incoherently.

‘Yes,’ he said after a moment, ‘but of course I’ll say I was. You see, when we left New York she was very nervous and she thought it would steady her to drive – and this woman rushed out at us just as we were passing a car coming the other way. It all happened in a minute, but it seemed to me that she wanted to speak to us, thought we were somebody she knew. Well, first Daisy turned away from the woman toward the other car, and then she lost her nerve and turned back. The second my hand reached the wheel I felt the shock – it must have killed her instantly.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 7, Gatsby is so in love with Daisy that he is willing to lie and take the blame for the hit and run accident in which Daisy knocks down Myrtle.
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