Myrtle Wilson Quotes

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 2. While riding on the train to the city with Tom, Nick tells us that Tom uses the train stop to meet up with his mistress Myrtle Wilson for a night filled with drunkenness and violence. The ‘ashes’ description symbolizes the valley’s moral depravity and social decline.

Then I heard footsteps on the stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Nick’s description of Myrtle Wilson, focusing almost entirely on her body and her sensuousness. It is obvious Nick doesn’t see much in Myrtle as regards intellect or personality. An unhappily married woman, her husband George is depicted as a ghost whom she walks through to get her lover Tom Buchanan.

‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity – except his wife, who moved close to Tom.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1. In the valley of ashes, there is a thick veil of gray dust that makes it look as if everything is made out of it. Especially George Wilson, who is wears his sadness and desolation like a gray suit. His wife Myrtle is having an affair with Tom Buchanan.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 2. In the valley of ashes, there is a thick veil of gray dust that makes it look as if everything is made out of it. Especially George Wilson, who is wears his sadness and desolation like a gray suit. His wife Myrtle is having an affair with Tom Buchanan.

‘You see,’ cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. ‘It’s really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic, and they don’t believe in divorce.’
Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 2, Tom has invented this elaborate lie to to cover over the real reason he won’t divorce Daisy to marry Myrtle – class difference. Myrtle is not of his social class so he strings her along with lies.

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.

Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.
‘Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!’ shouted Mrs. Wilson. ‘I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai – ‘
Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 2, tempers flare at Gatsby’s party, fueled by the bootleg booze. Tom, a vicious brute, breaks the nose of the cheap and vulgar Myrtle.

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.

‘I spoke to her,’ he muttered, after a long silence. ‘I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window’ – with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it – ‘and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!’
Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night.
‘God sees everything,’ repeated Wilson.
‘That’s an advertisement,’ Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 8, George Wilson is talking about his dead wife Myrtle, whom he found out had been cheating on him. Wilson believes that God, the source of ultimate knowledge and justice, sees everything. He confuses the eyes of Doctor Eckleburg with the eyes of God, but they are the remains of an old billboard advert for a company that no longer exists.

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.

He broke off defiantly. ‘What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s, but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car.’
There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 9. Tom Buchanan confesses to Nick Carraway that he was the one who had spoken to Wilson about Myrtle’s death on the day Wilson murdered Gatsby. Tom put the blame on Gatsby, unaware it was Daisy, not Gatsby, who ran over Myrtle. Nick doesn’t tell Tom it was Daisy at the wheel, and lies to protect her.
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