Gatsby Quotes - Class and Status Flashcards
[Myrtle] “The only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and never even told me about it.”
Chapter 2, Page 24, top
“Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees - he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.”
Chapter 6, Page 71, 1/3 down
[Tom and Daisy after Myrtle’s death] “They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale - and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.”
Chapter 7, Page 93, 1/4 down
[Tom] “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out… Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.”
Chapter 7, Page 83, top/last of 82
[Daisy] “She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, as though she realized at last what she was doing - and as though she has never, all along, intended doing anything at all.”
Chapter 7, Page 84, 2/3 down
“‘She’s not leaving me!’ Tom’s words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby. ‘Certainly not for a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he put on her finger.’”
Chapter 7, Page 85, middle
[Daisy] “‘Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money - that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it… high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…”
Chapter 8, Page 76, near the bottom
“‘Jay Gatsby’ I had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice”
Chapter 8, Page 94, middle
[Gatsby always feels distance from ‘nice’ girls] “always with indiscernible barbed wire between”
Chapter 8, Page 94, middle
[Gatsby’s feelings about Daisy’s house] “There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor-cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered.”
Chapter 8, Page 94, 2/3 down
“It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy - it increased her value I’m his eyes.”
Chapter 8, Page 94, 3/4 down
[Gatsby] “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.”
Chapter 8, Page 94, very bottom
“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…”
Chapter 9, Page 114, middle
[Gatsby] “He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realise just how extraordinary a ‘nice’ girl could be.”
Chapter 8, Page 95, 1/4 down
“Gatsby’s was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.”
Chapter 8, Page 95, middle
