Quotes from The Great Gatsby

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The closing line of the novel, and the most quoted sentence in American literature. Most readers take it as a wistful image of nostalgia. Read in context, it is darker. Nick has just buried Gatsby almost alone, watched the Buchanans walk away from the consequences of two deaths, and decided to leave the East. The boats are not heroic; they are exhausted. The past does not call us back gently, it drags.

“Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!”

Gatsby's reply when Nick gently suggests Daisy may not be available to him anymore. The exclamation marks are part of the tragedy: a grown man insisting on something that, if you have ever loved anyone for five years from a distance, you know is impossible. Fitzgerald gives the delusion to Gatsby in three sentences so the rest of the novel can take it apart.

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter, tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.”

The penultimate paragraph. The green light is Daisy's dock; Nick generalises it into the American Dream itself. Notice the verb: the future recedes. Gatsby's whole project, the parties, the shirts, the borrowed accent, was an attempt to outrun something that, by definition, moves with you. Fitzgerald is not mocking him for it. He is saying the country runs on the same engine.

“Her voice is full of money.”

Gatsby says this about Daisy, and it is the moment Nick understands him completely. Until now Daisy has been described as enchanting, sad, cool. Gatsby names what was really attractive about her: not her, but the inherited wealth that gives her voice that careless lilt. It is the most honest thing he says in the novel, and Fitzgerald hands it to him as praise, not critique.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy, they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Nick's verdict on the Buchanans, near the end. The genius of the sentence is the casual list (things and creatures) that puts dead bodies and broken furniture in the same grammatical position. That is the point. To Tom and Daisy, the difference is administrative. Wealth, Fitzgerald argues, is not just inequality of resources but a permanent moral pass.

“I hope she'll be a fool, that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

Daisy says this about her newborn daughter. It is the most cited evidence that Daisy is not, in fact, the airhead the novel sometimes lets her play. She knows exactly what her own life has been; she is wishing her daughter into the only kind of survival she has seen work. The line is a moment of clear sight quickly buried under the performance she returns to.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”

The opening of the novel. Nick uses his father's advice as proof of his tolerance. But reread it after finishing the book: Nick is one of the most judgemental narrators in American fiction. He calls Tom a brute, Daisy careless, Jordan dishonest, his neighbours fools. The opening is not a confession of openness; it is the polite alibi a judgemental man tells himself before he starts judging.

“Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.”

The next sentence after the advice from his father. It sounds wise. It is also the line that lets Nick spend a summer watching an affair, a murder, a hit-and-run and a death, and call himself, in the same breath, a man within and without. The novel is a study in how reserving judgement can curdle into letting things happen.

“I'm one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”

Nick says this to himself after dropping a letter to a girl back home so he can flirt with Jordan. The sentence is the comic high point of the novel's quiet joke about its narrator. Fitzgerald gives Nick the self-image of an honest man and the behaviour of a man who lies to two people in two cities and lets a third drown. The reader is supposed to notice.

“I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.”

Nick at the start of the novel, listing the books he has just bought on banking and finance. The genius of the paragraph is that the books are described as objects, not texts: they stand on the shelf, they are red and gold like coins, they promise. Nick has bought them to look like a man with high intention, not to read them. The whole novel will be him not reading them, and getting drawn instead into a story about another man who built a beautiful surface and never finished what was inside it.

“I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.”

Jordan's epigram about parties is the cleanest articulation in the novel of how the rich hide in crowds. The line works because she means it sincerely. At Gatsby's parties, nobody knows whose house it is or where their host is; the noise lets you stop performing. Fitzgerald uses Jordan, who is otherwise unsentimental, to deliver the most accurate observation about the world Gatsby is throwing the parties to enter.

“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.”

Nick's first description of Gatsby's smile, before he knows who he is. The whole novel is contained in this paragraph: a smile, eternal reassurance, the precise number of times you will see something like it. Fitzgerald gives Gatsby the smile of a great salesman, and Nick experiences it as the smile of a great soul. The book is partly about how those two things are difficult to tell apart.

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

Jordan's line about the world. It sounds like cynicism. It is also one of the most quietly precise sociological statements in the novel: she is naming an economy, not a mood. Gatsby is pursuing, Daisy is being pursued, Nick is busy noticing them, Wilson is tired. Every major character can be sorted into one of these four categories within five minutes of meeting them.