In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me
some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told
me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't
had the advantages that you've had."
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1, opening words. |
Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed
on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams
that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows
and short-winded elations of men.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1, Nick on Gatsby. |
[Tom] would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully,
for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1. |
In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year....Do you
always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it?
I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss
it.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1. |
Civilization's going to pieces. I've gotten to be a terrible
pessimist about things... The idea is if we don't look out the
white race will be -- will be utterly submerged... It's up to
us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races
will have control of things.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1, Tom. |
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.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1, Daisy on her newborn girl. |
I KNOW. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done
everything…Sophisticated - God, I'm sophisticated.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1, Daisy. |
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.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 2. |
He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so
dumb he doesn't know he's alive.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 2, Tom, on Wilson and his wife
Myrtle, with whom Tom is having an affair. |
I married him because I thought he was a gentleman...I thought
he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick
my shoe.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 2, Myrtle on Wilson. |
He borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in, and never
told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he
was out...I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried...all
afternoon.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 2, Myrtle. |
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.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 2. |
I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house
I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People
were not invited - they went there.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 3. |
I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might
sober me up to sit in a library.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 3. |
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?
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 3. |
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.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 3, on Gatsby. |
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.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 3, Nick. |
It takes two to make an accident.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 3. |
Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal
virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people
that I have ever known.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 3, Nick on himself. |
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.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 4. |
I belong to another generation....You sit...and discuss your
sports and your young ladies....As for me, I am fifty years
old, and I won't impose myself on you any longer.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 4. |
A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement:
"There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and
the tired."
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 4. |
Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights
in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring
tragically into my eyes.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 5. |
Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always
been obstinate about being peasantry.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 5. |
It makes me sad because I've never seen such - such beautiful
shirts before.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 5. |
If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the
bay....You always have a green light that burns all night at
the end of your dock.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 5. |
One thing's sure and nothing's surer
The rich get richer and the poor get - children.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 5. |
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy
tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault but
because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone
beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it
with a creative passion.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 5, Nick, on Gatsby's idealization
of Daisy. |
The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang
from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God-a
phrase which, if it means anything, means just that-and he must
be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar,
and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay
Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent,
and to this conception he was faithful to the end.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 6. |
It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things
upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
The Great Gatsby
Chapter 6. |
Sex
and the City
