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F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

I'm p-paralyzed with happiness - Daisy quote in The Great Gatsby

‘I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.’
She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1. Daisy Buchanan’s first words in the novel, spoken to narrator Nick Carraway upon his arrival at the Buchanan residence. But is Daisy’s happiness a lie, merely a performance? Daisy may feel ‘paralyzed’ by being trapped in a loveless marriage that does not give her emotional satisfaction.

I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Daisy’s voice has a poetry and energy to it. The suggestion is that she uses that voice to allure and coerce, drawing the listener to her physically and emotionally.
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.

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.

Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 6, the ladder is a symbol of success and also the climb to reaching the American Dream. Gatsby can only climb the ladder alone if he wants to fulfil his dreams. He must choose between whether he wants love or success. But he tries to achieve both and this ends with his destruction later on.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 6, Gatsby on his first kiss with Daisy. This kiss ties Daisy to all of Gatsby’s bigger dreams for a better life – to his American Dream. And it also sets the stage for the tragic ending to the novel, when Daisy cannot hold up under the weight of the dream Gatsby projects onto her and instead stays with Tom Buchanan.
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