Quotes from The Great Gatsby

You can’t repeat the past.

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

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

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.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

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

I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy.

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it.

There are all kinds of love in this world, but never the same love twice.

I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

Angry and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can!

They’re a rotten crowd, I shouted across the lawn. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Quotes from The Great Gatsby part 2

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.

Being sincere is a full-time job.

You must be misunderstanding me, old sport. I’m just telling you the truth.

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

You can’t help who you love.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people.

I wouldn’t ask too much of her, I ventured. You can’t repeat the past.

Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick.

I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy, I confessed on my second glass of champagne.

But in the end, unremarkable. 30.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. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the creative temperament—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. 31.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. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. 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. Precisely at that point it vanished–and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care. 32.No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. 33.And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy. 34.Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can! 35.Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. 36.That’s the whole burden of this novel — the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory. 37.So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. 38.Civilization’s going to pieces. I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.