Quotes & Sayings About Gatsby

When I left class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of dream? — Azar Nafisi

And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby — Azar Nafisi

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil. — Azar Nafisi

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 - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... And one fine morning
— F Scott Fitzgerald

Whereas 'Avatar' and other movies get shocks out of their three-dimensionality, 'Gatsby' is going to be about inviting the audience into this larger-than-life drama, letting them almost be inside the room rather than looking at it through the window. I think it will really work. — Joel Edgerton

I have a hard time finding something that I really enjoy reading, but I read 'The Great Gatsby' every summer. — Dree Hemingway

If you go back, 'The Great Gatsby' would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business. — Robert Harris

If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns at the end of your dock."
Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly 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 him, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted things had diminished by one. — F Scott Fitzgerald

"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now-isn't that enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly. "I did love him once-but I loved you too."
Gatsby's eyes opened and closed.
"You loved me too?" he repeated.
"Even that's a lie," said Tom savagely. "She didn't know you were alive. Why-there're things between Daisy and me that you'll never know, things that neither of us can ever forget." — F Scott Fitzgerald

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Mr. Leonardo DiCaprio - he be soo gorgeous, no wonder all the ladies flockin' to him - He be Gatsby. — Amitabh Bachchan

In these fast and fickle times, it's nice to know that there are some things you can always count on: the enduring brilliance of the last page of The Great Gatsby; the near-religious harmonies of the Beach Boys' "California Girls"; and the lifelong friendship of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. — Sarah Vowell

I could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream. — Azar Nafisi

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. No - Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what — F Scott Fitzgerald

The most enduring stories in literature generally have some kind of crime at their center, whether it's the bloody butchery of 'Hamlet,' the lecherous misanthropes of Dickens or the lone gunman from 'The Great Gatsby.' — Karin Slaughter

Daisy doesn't even go to his funeral, Nick and Jordan part ways, and Daisy ends up sticking with racist Tom ... you can tell Fitzgerald never took the time to look up at clouds during sunset, because there's no silver lining at the end of that book, let me tell you.
I do see why Nikki likes the novel, as it's written so well. But her liking it makes me worry now that Nikki really doesn't believe in silver linings, because she says The Great Gatsby is the greatest novel ever written by an American, and yet it ends so sadly. One thing's for sure, Nikki is going to be very proud of me when I tell her I finally read her favorite book. -Silver Linings Playbook, p. 9 — Matthew Quick

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all
Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby] — Maxwell Perkins

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. 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. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Van Houten was still staring at the ceiling beams. He took a drink. The glass was almost empty again. 'Lidewij, I can't do it. I can't. I can't.' He leveled his gaze to me. 'Nothing happens to the Dutch Tulip Man. He isn't a con man or not a con man; he's God. He's an obvious and unambiguous metaphorical representation of God, and asking what becomes of him if the intellectual equivalent of asking what becomes of the disembodied eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in Gatsby. Do he and Anna's man get married? We are speaking of a novel, dear child, not some historical enterprise. — John Green

I'm not good at living in the grim places ... when we did Gatsby, I lived in Claridges, that's where I wanted to live. I can't live in grimness and then go play a classy human being. — Bruce Dern

Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country's writers. — Jonathan Yardley

I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life. — F Scott Fitzgerald

After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby's party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world. — F Scott Fitzgerald

He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body. — F Scott Fitzgerald

This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and riding smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. — F Scott Fitzgerald

In my opinion, Fiction is a figment of our imagination & it causes us to dream but Reality taints dreams, and the F.scott Fitzgerald has clearly depicted this in The Great Gatsby. — Parul Wadhwa

They're a rotten crowd', I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I think that The Great Gatsby has had some influence on contemporary dressing. I'm seeing more boyish haircuts and drop-waist sheath dresses. — Ruth E. Carter

There's green eyes in my eyes
And a lover on my mind
And I sing from the piano
Tear my yellow dress and
Cry and cry and cry
Over the love of you — Florence Welch

Rich girls don't marry poor boys, Jay Gatsby — F Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald's work was almost entirely out of print when 'The Lost Weekend' was published in 1944 - even 'Gatsby' seemed well on its way to being forgotten - and Jackson had meant to be 'deliberately prophetic' in calling attention to a writer he considered the foremost chronicler of 'the temper and spirit of the time.' More than twenty years later he finally received credit, in writing, for having played a key role in the so-called Fitzgerald Revival. — Blake Bailey

I found myself on Gatsby's side and alone. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy or Gatsby anymore, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal skepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. — F Scott Fitzgerald

So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate road-house next door. — F Scott Fitzgerald

'The Great Gatsby' ticked so many boxes for me. — Joel Edgerton

I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Great people especially must be careful about what they worship. — John Green

It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air. — F Scott Fitzgerald

You two start on home, Daisy,' said Tom. 'In Mr Gatsby's car.'
She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.
'Go on. He won't annoy you. I think he realises that his presumptuous little flirtation is over. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby. — F Scott Fitzgerald

He broke off and began to walk u and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers. — F Scott Fitzgerald

They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family. — Francis Ford Coppola

Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. - The Great Gatsby. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Just handling this ocean of different books - new and used, in and out of print, famous and forgotten - it was literature as this giant mosaic of texts and experiments and attitudes. I think it's just very liberating to break out of a great man's theory of history.
I guess I've always liked working from that sense of - what would you call it? - license that the margins permit. I always just visualize myself writing books that were meant one day to be dusty, forgotten volumes being encountered by intrepid browsers in a used bookstore. It was a much less freighted way to think about trying to enter the conversation than to imagine I had to write The Great Gatsby. — Jonathan Lethem

The Gatsby that I remember reading when I was 15 years old in junior high school was far different from the Gatsby I read as an adult. — Leonardo DiCaprio

What gets me about D.B., though, he hated the war so much, and yet he got me to read this book A Farewell to Arms last summer. He said it was so terrific. That's what I can't understand. It had this guy in it named Lieutenant Henry that was supposed to be a nice guy and all. I don't see how D.B. could hate the Army and war and all so much and still like a phony like that. I mean, for instance, I don't see how he could like a phony like that and still like that one by Ring Lardner, or that other one he's so crazy about, The Great Gatsby. D.B. got sore when I said that, and said I was too young and all to appreciate it, but I don't think so. I told him I liked Ring Lardner and The Great Gatsby and all. I did, too. I was crazy about The Great Gatsby. Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me. — J.D. Salinger

Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help me while away the hours as the rain pounds down on the porch roof, taking me away from the gloom and on to somewhere sunny, somewhere else. — Anna Quindlen

I did some songs for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby. I had done a jazz album of Roxy songs, and they used bits of it in the film. It would be nice to score a movie one day. — Bryan Ferry

I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s. — Garrett Hedlund

Fitzgerald describes the social disillusionments and ballroom romanticism of the young people of the upper classes and the loneliness of Gatsby, who gives large parties and has an extensive social life; yet he is lonely, and his guests scarcely know him ... Hemingway's characters live in a tourist world, and one of their major problems is that of consuming time itself. It is interesting to observe that his works are written from the stand point of the spectator. His characters are usually people who are looking
looking at bullfights, scenery, and at one another across cafe tables. — James T. Farrell

Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby [is] my imaginary eldest brother. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. — F Scott Fitzgerald

It's pathetic, but I don't really remember my first time reading 'The Great Gatsby.' I must have read it in high school. I'm pretty sure I remember it being assigned, and I generally did the reading. But I don't remember having a reaction to the book, even though I loved literature, and other works made a lasting impression on me at that age. — Susan Choi

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared. — Michael Cunningham

I was very new to working in front of the camera when I started shooting 'Gatsby', so I set myself the mission of gleaning as much information as possible out of the much more experienced actors. The cast was astoundingly talented. — Elizabeth Debicki

Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge, anything at all ... — F Scott Fitzgerald

They knew the difference between thoroughness and overkill. It was like Jay Gatsby's library: the books were real, but the pages were uncut. — Haruki Murakami

The feelings I thought I had left behind returned when, almost nineteen years later, the Islamic regime would once again turn against its students. This time it would open fire on those it had admitted to the universities, those who were its own children, the children of the revolution. Once more my students would go to the hospitals in search of the murdered bodies that where stolen by the guards and vigilantes and try to prevent them from stealing the wounded.
I would like to know where Mr. Bahri is right now, at this moment, and to ask him: How did it all turn out, Mr. Bahri - was this your dream, your dream of the revolution? Who will pay for all those ghosts in my memories? Who will pay for the snapshots of the murdered and the executed that we hid in our shoes and closets as we moved on to other things? Tell me, Mr. Bahri-or, to use that odd expression of Gatsby's, Tell me, old sport- what shell we do with all this corpses on our hands? — Azar Nafisi

I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones. — Spencer Boldman

Take off that darn fur coat! ... Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows. — F Scott Fitzgerald

There are two of my favorite books, 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Gone With The Wind', that were made into movies. And I love those movies as much as I love the books. That's really rare. — Tatiana De Rosnay

My dark secret is I've always wished I was Gatsby. As heartbroken as he was and as horrible a fate as he endured, I admired that he loved. It's a difficult thing to do. — Sarah Noffke

My own rule is to let everything alone. — F Scott Fitzgerald

All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby. — John Green

I'd once again see that bob of blonde hair back on my pillow, that pink hot smile beaming toward me as I heroically win her heart in some kind of Count of Monte Cristo or Great Gatsby-esque gesture ... you know minus the long imprisonment or swimming pool death! — Tom Conrad

The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed in strange new ways ... — F Scott Fitzgerald

But I know now that isn't true; history is filled with fictional people. And even the epigraph Fitzgerald placed at the beginning of The Great Gatsby is by a writer who doesn't exist. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary - made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to. — Robyn Schneider

I found something! Courage
just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always. — F Scott Fitzgerald

You can't not like 'The Great Gatsby.' It's got the best sentences in, like, ever. — John Green

What make Gatsby so damn great - like da book's title indicatin' - is dat unlike da rest of deez shallow rich folk, Gatsby actually believe in somethin': love, dawg. He build himself a new identity jus' for Daisy. Errybody else straight-up empty inside. — Sparky Sweets

My hair-- bob it! — F Scott Fitzgerald

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. — F Scott Fitzgerald

That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said "On the Road." He smiled, said, "That was my favorite book at sixteen." At the time , I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I'm more of a Gatsby girl-more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer. — Sarah Vowell

Something in his leisurely move- ments and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to deter- mine what share was his of our local heavens. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The Colors, The Iliad, Ulysses, Metamorphosis, the Theban plays, The Draconic Labels, Anabasis, and restricted works like The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, Lady Casterly's Penance, 1984, and The Great Gatsby. I — Pierce Brown

One emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I picked up my college copy of 'The Great Gatsby' in an attempt to recover from the movie and was interested to find out what I'd underlined. The answer was basically: everything. — Gail Collins

I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love. — Tom Perrotta

The Great Gatsby' [ ... ] was my 'Tom Sawyer' when I was twelve [ ... ] — J.D. Salinger

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.' — Pat Conroy

The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It shows us how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if you don't compromise, you may suffer. — Azar Nafisi

I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years. — A. Scott Berg

Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this 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. [- Nick Carroway] — F Scott Fitzgerald

He's just a man names Gatsby. — F Scott Fitzgerald

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. — F Scott Fitzgerald

When I read the actual story-how Gatsby loves Daisy so much but can't ever be with her no matter how hard he tries-I feel like ripping the book in half and calling up Fitzgerald and telling him his book is all wrong, even though I know Fitzgerald is probably deceased. Especially when Gatsby is shot dead in his swimming pool the first time he goes for a swim all summer, Daisy doesn't even go to his funeral, Nick and Jordan part ways, and Daisy ends up sticking with racist Tom, whose need for sex basically murders an innocent woman, you can tell Fitzgerald never took the time to look up at clouds during sunset, because there's no silver lining at the end of that book, let me tell you. — Matthew Quick

Here are more lines from The Great Gatsby. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove.

I like to remember when I was one of them, or to pretend that I am one of them still, sensing that restless man at my back and half turning, no, turning all the way, open-armed, saying, Pick me, pick me. — Sigrid Nunez

And a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove — F Scott Fitzgerald

Well, any friend of Gatsby is a friend of mine — Haruki Murakami

A literary fetish is the new black — Danielle Ganek

The artist, wrote Joseph Conrad, "speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives." That was the art that Scott Fitzgerald would find, reminding us that a mirage may be more marvelous in its way than an oasis in the desert. Gatsby's great error is his belief in the reality of the mirage; Fitzgerald's great gift was his belief in the mirage as a mirage. "Splendor," Fitzgerald came to understand, "was something in the heart. — Sarah Churchwell

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald's contemporaries couldn't bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall. — Sarah Churchwell

Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels
the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence. — Azar Nafisi

Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me. — Rob Sheffield

Where the road sloped upward beyond the trees, I sat and looked toward the building where Naoko lived. It was easy to tell which room was hers. All I had to do was find the one window toward the back where a faint light trembled. I focused on that point of light for a long, long time. It made me think of something like the final throb of a soul's dying embers. I wanted to cup my hands over what was left and keep it alive. I went on watching the way Jay Gatsby watched that tiny light on the opposite shore night after night. — Haruki Murakami

Hating "The Great Gatsby" (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be. — Joyce Carol Oates

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face. — F Scott Fitzgerald