The Great Gatsby 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.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, East Egg has mostly people who come from old money, or were born into their riches. Unlike the West Egg inhabitants who are mostly members of the nouveau riche, people who worked their way into their riches.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven – a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1. Nick’s description of Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan. From early on Tom is depicted as restless and bored, having peaked too early in life, with the threat of physical aggression lurking behind that restlessness.

Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it – I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Nick on the Buchanans. Our introduction to Tom and Daisy right away describes them as rich, bored and privileged. Tom is restless, indulging in affairs, and Daisy is burdoned down with the knowledge of those affairs. This restlessness and resentment places them straight on the path to the tragedy at the end of the novel.

Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body – he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage – a cruel body.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Nick on Tom Buchanan’s appearance. He is described as masculine, aggressive, and also dangerous. A man who could be violent, and in fact is.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it – indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Nick acknowledges Jordan Baker’s egotism and conceit with an astonished tribute.
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.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, description of Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker. The two are so lightweight that they appear to be floating, the imagery suggests that the characters live restless, dissatisfied and hollow lives. They dress in white, symbol of purity, but that may be seen as ironic because of their own corruption. The tranquility of the scene is disrupted by Tom Buchanan who abruptly shuts the windows with a ‘boom’, suggesting trouble in paradise and Tom’s violent nature.

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.

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.
‘Look!’ she complained. ‘I hurt it.’
We all looked – the knuckle was black and blue.
‘You did it, Tom,’ she said accusingly. ‘I know you didn’t mean to, but you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a – ‘
‘I hate that word hulking,’ objected Tom crossly, ‘even in kidding.’
‘Hulking,’ insisted Daisy.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Daisy’s bruised finger is a symbol of the marriage between her and Tom. Their relationship, like the conversation, is full of tension and immaturity, is not built on concrete foundations and will easily fall apart. The marriage is an illusion and they both go on to have affairs and continue to live together as if they were happily married.

‘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 all scientific stuff; it’s been proved…It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.’

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby. Chapter 1, Tom Buchanan, whose racism is evident from the very beginning of the novel. He believes that African-American people should not be associated with people of European origin. Even at a dinner party he can barely conceal his violent tendencies.
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