The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Quotes
Because you can never go wrong with some Frank Ocean.
Summary
The Great Gatsby is an American literary classic. Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the book has a rare quality of being about so many different things depending on who’s reading it. It can be a story about love, betrayal, friendship, and even class struggle. I've read the book a couple of times. Most recently, I read it this August. On that reading, I felt it was a story about destiny.
As you will see from the selected quotes, Fitzgerald’s writing is incredibly beautiful. The quotes below are some of the lines I enjoyed most when reading this story again. It is also a testament to the talents of Fitzgerald whose writing is masterful.
Enjoy!
Quotes
'Whenever you feel like criticising anyone,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had.'
‘For a moment the last sunshine fell without romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened – then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.’
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 eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so 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.
‘There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.’
He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy, he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamt it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.
He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that the drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can stir up in his ghostly heart.
As I watched him, he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear, he turned towards her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over dreamt- that voice was a deathless song.
When the melody rose her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.
Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space.
He found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail. He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn't realise just how extraordinary.
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?
They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, then when she brushed silent lips against his coat shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true, he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing arose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about… like that ashen fantastic figure gliding towards him through the amorphous trees