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Nick Carraway Quotes

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1. Although Gatsby represents everything that Nick hates and he sees him as low-class, he exempts him for it because Gatsby was born poor and worked for his money.

The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Nick is from a prominent and well off family, but hasn’t lived the luxurious life that Daisy and Tom have. Instead Nick’s family achieved the American Dream through hard work. Referring to the family’s tradition of who they were descended from, he admits that’s all an illusion.

I lived at West Egg, the – well, the least fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard … My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires – all for eighty dollars a month.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Nick is wealthy enough to live in West Egg but not wealthy enough to rent a very nice place. But though he may live in a small house, he does get to live beside millionaires.

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.

Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the ‘Saturday Evening Post’ – the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1. Nick pays close attention to Jordan’s placement and posture, as she reads from the couch, suggesting that he may be developing an interest in her.

I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1, Nick eyes Jordan Baker, a professional golfer of some fame. We see his immediate physical attraction to her so it comes as no surprise that he becomes romantically involved. But in keeping with the valley of ashes theme, Jordan’s gray eyes suggest something hidden about this woman who cheats at golf and also bends the truth.

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.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 2. Nick portrays himself as torn between his disgust for the tainted, manipulative, high-class people he is mixing with and his enchantment with them.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements, that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table – the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 3, it is ironic that Nick expresses his uncomfortableness since he – unlike Gatsby’s other guests – has been invited to attend the lavish party at Gatsby’s mansion.

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.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 3. Nick is in awe on his first meeting with Gatsby, the American Dream personified. He is captivated by his new friend’s charming and charismatic personality, especially his smile, the kind of smile you only experience a few times in your life.

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.

Her (Jordan) gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. I’d been writing letters once a week and signing them: ‘Love, Nick,’ and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 3, Nick describes his relationship with Jordan, whom he thinks he is in love with. At the same time he is telling his ‘girl’ back home that he loves her.

He reached in his pocket and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell into my palm.
‘That’s the one from Montenegro.’
To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look.
Orderi di Danilo, ran the circular legend, Montenegro, Nicolas Rex.
‘Turn it.’
Major Jay Gatsby, I read, For Valour Extraordinary.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 4. On seeing Gatsby’s medal, Nick begins to believe and appreciate Gatsby and no longer just views him as a puffed-up fraud who bent and exaggerated the truth.

I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people – with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 4, Meyer Wolfsheim fixing the World Series is a crime that appalls Nick. But while the burglar gets caught, Wolfsheim uses his wealth and underworld contacts to stay clean.
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