Great Gatsby Character Quotes Flashcards
Jay Gatsby
Can’t repeat the past?
Why, of course you can!
He had one of those rare smiles
with a quality of eternal reassurance in it.
He was a son
of God.
Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island
sprang up from his platonic conception of himself.
To this conception, he was
faithful until the end.
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes
and felt it in others.
I usually find myself among strangers
because I drift here and there.
Nick Carraway
I was privy to the secret griefs
of wild, unknown men.
I bought a dozen volumes
of banking and credit and investment securities.
Promising to unfold the shiny secrets that only
Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew.
Our line of yellow windows must have contributed
their share of human secrecy to the causal watcher.
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted
and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
I am one of the few honest people
I have ever known.
Unlike Gatsby and Tom, I had no girl whose
disembodied face floated.
Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs,
have always been obstinate about being peasantry.
They’re a rotten crowd -
You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.
Daisy Buchanan
I’m p-paralyzed
with happiness.
There was an excitement in her voice…
a singing compulsion… a promise…
That there were gay, exciting things
hovering in the next hour.
They moved with the fast crowd, all of them young and rich
but Daisy came out with an absolutely perfect reputation.
She’s got an indiscreet voice.
It’s full of money.
Daisy was young and her artifical world was redolent of
cheerful snobbery and orchestras -
- which set up the year,
summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.
Tom Buchanan
I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully,
for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
It was a body capable of
enormous leverage.
It’s a fine book… if we don’t look out
the white race will be - will be utterly submerged.
Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas
as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.
Jordan Baker
She held my hand impersonally,
as a promise that she’d take care of me in a minute.
Jordan Baker instinctively avoided
clever, shrewd men.
She was
incurably honest.
I suppose she begun dealing in subterfuges
to satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.
I thought you were rather an honest,
straight forward person.
I thought it was your
secret pride.
Myrtle Wilson
She carried her surplus flesh sensuously
as some women can.
There was an immediately perceptible vitality about her,
as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering.
Mrs Wilson had changed her costume and was now attired
in an elaborate dress of cream-coloured chiffon.
Her personality had also
undergone a change.
converted into
impressive hauteur.
Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair
at the shiftlessness of the lower orders.
I married George because I thought he was a gentleman,
but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.
