Written and set in the 1920s, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a classic work of literature that isn’t easy to categorize. At its heart, you could say it is a love story, but Fitzgerald entangles this yearning with tales of epic parties, commentaries on classicism, and existential probing.
The title character, Jay Gatsby represents the epitome of the perhaps unattainable American Dream. Throughout the story, Gatsby is shown, time and again, that wealth and infamy are not enough to make him truly happy. To achieve that level of contentment, he determines that he must win over the girl of his dreams, Daisy Buchanan. The plot is thick, the characters are profound, and the prose: unforgettably gorgeous. We’ve compiled over 50 quotes from The Great Gatsby to demonstrate the depth of this timeless tale.
Quotes About Wealth, Class, and Society
Much of the intrigue within The Great Gatsby is built upon difficulties that arise when different classes of people interact. In the 1920s, class barriers were harsh, and the so-called American Dream separated those who beat the system from the less fortunate masses. In Gatsby, Fitzgerald probes the very concept of the American Dream and its myth. These quotes reflect both the reality of financial turmoil and the lure of the lavish, glittery lifestyles of the wealthy and elite.
1. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
2. “I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
3. “I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
4. “My dear, most of these fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet and when she gave me the bill you’d of thought she had my appendix out.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
5. “The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
6. “‘She’s got an indiscreet voice,’ I remarked. ‘It’s full of—’ I hesitated. ‘Her voice is full of money,’ [Gatsby] said suddenly.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
7. “She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
8. “I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
9. “I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
10. “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
11. “At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
12. “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
13. “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
14. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
15. “‘You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,’ I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. ‘Can’t you talk about crops or something?’” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
16. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Quotes About Love
At its very core, The Great Gatsby is a tragic story of love (both unrequited and passionate), desire, and loss. These quotes about love, spoken by various characters throughout the novel, vary between heart-wrenching and hopeful.
17. “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
18. “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
19. “Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
20. “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion... No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
21. “His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
22. “For a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
23. “The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
24. “‘Oh, you want too much!’ she cried to Gatsby. ‘I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.’ [Daisy] began to sob helplessly. ‘I did love him once—but I loved you too.’” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
25. “They had never been closer in their month of love nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
26. “He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
27. “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.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
28. “It excited him too that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
29. “I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t, because she was in love with me too... 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?” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
30. “Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Quotes About Life
Some of the most iconic quotes in The Great Gatsby are more general musings about life. Even though they were coined nearly a century ago, many of these quotes still ring true today.
31. “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
32. “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
33. “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
34. “I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
35. “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
36. “I couldn’t forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
37. “Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
38. “Can’t repeat the past?...Why of course you can!” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
39. “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
40. “‘You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,’ she went on in a convinced way. ‘Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything... Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!’” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
41. “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, The Great Gatsby
42. “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.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
43. “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—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
44. “All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
45. “It takes two to make an accident.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
46. “Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
47. “There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind...” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
48. “Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby-
49. “I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
50. “This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
51. "Human sympathy has its limits." – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
