Quotes & Sayings About Who Gatsby Is

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

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

It's been bothering me more and more that I can't ever see anything objectively, that every observation I make is filtered through my personal lens whether I like it or not. I mean, all my favorite novels are like that. F. Scott Fitzgerald basically is Gatsby, so obviously it's Gatsby's book, and Daisy comes off like a flake. But maybe in Daisy's unwritten book, Gatsby is a flashy, patronizing asshole who thinks he could win her with money and fancy stuff. And that might be an even better book. Eventually, — Anna Breslaw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A literary fetish is the new black — Danielle Ganek

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

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

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

Who is he anyhow, an actor?"
"No."
"A dentist?"
" ... No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added cooly: "He's the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919."
"Fixed the World Series?" I repeated.
The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people
with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.
"How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute.
"He just saw the opportunity."
"Why isn't he in jail?"
"They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man. — F Scott Fitzgerald

This is our siblings of more famous BookWorld Personalities self-help group expalined Loser (Gatsby). That's Sharon Eyre, the younger and wholly disreputable sister of Jane; Roger Yossarian, the draft dodger and coward; Rupert Bond, still a virgin and can't keep a secret; Tracy Capulet, who has slept her way round Verona twice; and Nancy Potter, who is a Muggle. — Jasper Fforde

My hair-- bob it! — F Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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