Great Gatsby Mortality Quotes

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.

‘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.

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.

He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8. Nick imagines what Gatsby must have been feeling when George Wilson shot him as he lay on an air mattress in his pool. He tries to imagine what it was like for Gatsby to have lost his dream – the American Dream and Daisy who was a major part of it. The symbolism of the flower suggests that Gatsby felt disillusioned with Daisy and she was not a worthy object of his worship. The ‘ashen’ figure is George Wilson, the character most closely associated with the Valley of Ashes.

There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other with little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water.

It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 8, Nick’s description of the scene of the murder, when Gatsby’s body is discovered. The language suggests that for all of his wealth and infamy, he he never quite made the impact that he had wished. He was a little ripple in a large pool called America. In death he was reduced to just a ‘thin red circle in the water.’ Gatsby’s murder and the discovery of the body of Wilson, who killed him, symbolize the death of Gatsby’s dream.

Most of those reports were a nightmare – grotesque, circumstantial, eager, and untrue. When Michaelis’s testimony at the inquest brought to light Wilson’s suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade – but Catherine, who might have said anything, didn’t say a word. She showed a surprising amount of character about it too – looked at the coroner with determined eyes under that corrected brow of hers, and swore that her sister had never seen Gatsby, that her sister was completely happy with her husband, that her sister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced herself of it, and cried into her handkerchief, as if the very suggestion was more than she could endure. So Wilson was reduced to a man ‘deranged by grief,’ in order that the case might remain in its simplest form. And it rested there.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 9, Following Gatsby’s death journalists spread rumors about his relationship with Myrtle and George Wilson. Myrtle’s sister Catherine allowed Gatsby to retain a little respect and dignity after he died, she claimed that Myrtle never cheated on Wilson. So the case was wrapped up as Wilson going crazy and killing a man.

After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth ajar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears. He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and splendor of the hall and the great rooms opening out from it into other rooms, his grief began to be mixed with an awed pride.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 9, Gatsby’s father who traveled half-way around the continent to see his son. It is as if he can’t process that his son is dead, or that this mansion belonged to him.

When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out. When I was a young man it was different…I stuck with them to the end…Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 9, Meyer Wolfshiem recalls the good times he had with Gatsby many years ago. he believes that living and celebrating with someone while they are alive is far better friendship than just showing up at their funeral.

A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing, and I began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars. So did Gatsby’s father. And as the time passed and the servants came in and stood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously, and he spoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way. The minister glanced several times at his watch, so I took him aside and asked him to wait for half an hour. But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 9, we all die alone. Some of are buried alone, none more so than the great man Gatsby, for whom nobody besides the owl-eyed man, Nick and Gatsby’s dad turns up for his funeral. In this material world where money reigns there are no spiritual values. God and religion are dead, and the American dream corrupted. When Gatsby is stripped of his material possessions in death, those who flocked to his parties in life don’t bother to attend his funeral.

The poor son-of-a-bitch.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 9, Owl Eyes at Gatsby’s funeral, the only party-goer there. He is the one person who seems to feel sorry for Gatsby, aside from his father and Nick. The Owl-Eyed Man in The Great Gatsby has been compared to the Dr. T. J. Eckleburg billboard with its ‘all-seeing’ eyes. Both are symbols of a spectator god. His attendance as one of the few to attend Gatsby’s funeral could be seen as meaning that God is watching when humans are laid to rest and Gatsby was worthy of his presence at his funeral.
Close