Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes. |
Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock....his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him. |
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind. |
He had committed himself to the following of a grail. |
He was a son of God…and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. |
He's a bootlegger....One time he killed a man who found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. |
his [Gatsby] career as Trimalchio was over. |
His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God...and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented...Jay Gatsby...and to this conception he was faithful to the end. |
I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. |
I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited - they went there. |
I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she didn't, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot beacause I knew different things from her....Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do? Gatsby |
I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone. |
I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound. |
I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool....You see, I think everything's terrible anyhow....And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. |
I’ll tell you God’s truth — Gatsby |