Key+Quotations+-+Gatsby

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** Gatsby - Key Quotations ** If personality if an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him. (Ch. 1)
 * Gatsby **

Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. (Ch. 1)

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. (Ch. 3)

Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once. (Ch. 3)

He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. (Ch. 5)

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 just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. (Ch. 6)

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.’ (Ch. 6)

‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’ He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.’ (Ch. 6)

But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever. (Ch. 8)

I shouted across the lawn, ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’ (Ch. 8)

It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. (Ch. 8)

… concealing his incorruptible dream… (Ch. 8)

He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. (Ch. 8)

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about… (Ch. 8)

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and 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… (Ch. 9)

There was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion… (Ch. 1)
 * Daisy **

‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before. (Ch. 5)

‘Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly. (Ch. 7)

‘She never loved you, do you hear?’ he cried. ‘She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved anyone except me!’ (Ch. 7)

With every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room. (Ch. 7)

So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight – watching over nothing. (Ch. 7)

She was the first ‘nice’ girl he had ever known. (Ch. 8)

It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy – it increased her value in his eyes. (Ch. 8)

… but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail. (Ch. 8)

For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery… (Ch. 8)

She wanted her life shaped now, immediately – and the decision must be made by some force – of love, of money, of unquestioning practicality – that was close at hand. (Ch. 8)

One of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax. (Ch. 1)
 * Tom **

Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete. (Ch. 7)

‘You’re revolting,’ said Daisy. (Ch. 7)

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. (Ch. 9)

They were careless people Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness. (Ch. 9)

In consequence, I am inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me. (Ch. 1)
 * Nick **

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. (Ch. 3)

I’d be damned if I’d go in; I’d had enough of all of them for one day, and suddenly that included Jordan too. (Ch. 7)

Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness. (Ch. 7)

… and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams. (Ch. 8)

… and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names. (Ch. 3)
 * Society **

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – (Ch. 3)

I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool... (Ch. 1)

I married him because I thought he was a gentleman...I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe. (Ch. 2)

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. (Ch. 9)

It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air. (Ch. 5)
 * The American Dream/Dreams **

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. (Ch. 5)

He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. (Ch. 5)

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. (Ch. 7)

It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… (Ch. 9)

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (Ch. 9)

A single green light, minute and faraway, that might have been the end of a dock." (Ch. 1)
 * Symbols **

The day agreed upon was pouring rain [when they meet for the first time in 5 years] (Ch. 5)

Possible it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. (Ch. 5)

I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed – that voice was a deathless song. (Ch. 5)

The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest of the summer. (Ch. 7)

Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, moulding its senselessness into forms. (Ch. 7)

Over the ashheaps the giant eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleberg kept their vigil. (Ch. 7)

‘I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window – ’ (Ch. 8)