Quotes & Sayings About Jay Gatsby's Past

Some days I am the flower beneath the machine. And the machine rolls slowly on, blocking the sun, without a care for what it tramples beneath. — Craig Stone

The third boat was quite pretty, too ... this one was an Adirondack fishing boat, and even though it was only half finished, I could picture Jay Gatsby in it, casting a line over the side while he yearned for that shallow tramp, Daisy. — Kristan Higgins

Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it? — Chuck Palahniuk

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 ... No
Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God - a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that - and he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. — F Scott Fitzgerald

No simple cherry picker for me, she thought. I get a time-traveling genius who comes with a world of problems and sends me back through time to fix them. — Karen Marie Moning

Fear is a far more dominant force in human behaviour than euphoria - I would never have expected that or given it a moment's thought before, but it shows up in the data in so many ways. — Alan Greenspan

But he knew that he was in Daisy's house by a colossal accident. However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously - eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand — F Scott Fitzgerald

And in it's magical pattern there was now a new element, a new glow, a cast of a golden colour which suffused everything, the source of which was a character in a book he had half read of and would never finish. He was not interested in what happened to Jay Gatsby. He was only interested that Jay Gatsby should exist. — Peter Carey

A naive, excitable teenaged reader is a beautiful thing. Someone who's never heard of Elizabeth Bennet or Jay Gatsby, until you tell him. And they all still believe in truth. That's the fun of it. — Holly LeCraw

I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the older girls I admired her most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn't come that day? The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. His name was Jay Gatsby and I didn't lay eyes on him again for over four years
even after I'd met him on Long Island I didn't realize it was the same man. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Jay Gatsby: Old sport. — F Scott Fitzgerald

In my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself. — Donna Tartt

I am drawn to Tom Sawyer Island because a tribute to Mark Twain would not be out of place in a theme park of my own design. Should Vowell World ever get enough investors, I'm going to stick my Tom Sawyer Island in Love and Death in the American Novel Land right between the Jay Gatsby Swimming Pool and Tom Joad's Dust Bowl Lanes, a Depression-themed bowling alley renting artfully worn-out shoes. — Sarah Vowell

For Americans, the car is the American way. Jay Gatsby roars through capitalism, individual freedom, and the good life. For China, the train is the metaphor. Everyone's on board, there's no chance to steer, and it's clickety-clack to collectivism's dreams. — Mei Fong

It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody - told it to me because "Jay Gatsby" had broken up like glass against Tom's hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Since changing interfaces breaks clients you should consider them as immutable once you've published them. — Erich Gamma

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

There is essentially no difference between the vitamin industry and the pharmaceutical and biotech industries (that — Ben Goldacre

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

I was growing up in the 50's and 60's. Back then they didn't even know what dyslexia was. — Caitlyn Jenner

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

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