The Great Gatsby

Question 1

Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven‘t had the advantages that you‘ve had‖

Answer 1

Ch 1

Question 2

In consequence, I‘m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores…Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. 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 parceled out unequally at birth‖

Answer 2

Ch 1

Question 3

All right…I‘m glad it‘s a girl. And I hope she‘ll be a fool – that‘s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool‖

Answer 3

Ch 1

Question 4

He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock

Answer 4

Ch 1

Question 5

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 forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air…the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud

Answer 5

Ch 2

Question 6

But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg

Answer 6

Ch 2

Question 7

With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur

Answer 7

Ch 2

Question 8

Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie

Answer 8

Ch 2

Question 9

Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face, discussing in impassioned voices whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy‘s name

Answer 9

Ch 2

Question 10

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby‘s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited

Answer 10

Ch 3

Question 11

Absolutely real – have pages and everything. I thought they‘d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact they‘re absolutely real. Pages and—here! Lemme show you

Answer 11

Ch 3

Question 12

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 eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as 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

Answer 12

Ch 3

Question 13

I see I have given the impression that the events…were all that absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs

Answer 13

Ch 3

Question 14

Everyone 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

Answer 14

Ch 3

Question 15

He‘s a bootlegger…One time he killed a man who had found out that he…‖

Answer 15

Ch 4

Question 16

He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand

Answer 16

Ch 4

Question 17

He looked at me sideways – and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying…‖

Answer 17

Ch 4

Question 18

She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up into a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap-dish when she saw that is was coming to pieces like snow

Answer 18

Ch 4

Question 19

Well, this would interest you. It wouldn‘t take up much of your time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing

Answer 19

Ch 5

Question 20

But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room

Answer 20

Ch 5

Question 21

It makes me sad because I‘ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before

Answer 21

Ch 5

Question 22

If it wasn‘t for the mist we could see you home across the bay…You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock

Answer 22

Ch 5

Question 23

He seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one

Answer 23

Ch 5

Question 24

They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn‘t know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life

Answer 24

Ch 5

Question 25

I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish

Answer 25

Ch 6

Question 26

Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy‘s running around alone, for on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby‘s party

Answer 26

Ch 6

Question 27

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‗I never loved you.‘ After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken

Answer 27

Ch 6

Question 28

Can‘t repeat the past?‘ he cried incredulously. Why of course you can!‘ He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. I‘m going to fix everything just the way it was before,‘ he said, nodding determinedly. She‘ll see

Answer 28

Ch 6

Question 29

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy

Answer 29

Ch 6

Question 30

Gatsby has dismissed every servant in his house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others…‗I wanted somebody who wouldn‘t gossip. Daisy comes over quite often – in the afternoons

Answer 30

Ch 7

Question 31

Her voice is full of money‘…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

Answer 31

Ch 7

Question 32

She never loved you, do you hear?‖ he cried. ‗She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved any one except me!

Answer 32

Ch 7

Question 33

I found out what your‘ ‗drug-stores‘ were…He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That‘s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn‘t far wrong…That drug-store business was just small change…but you‘ve got something on now that Walter‘s afraid to tell me about

Answer 33

Ch 7

Question 34

You two start on home, Daisy…In Mr. Gatsby‘s car…Go on. He won‘t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over

Answer 34

Ch 7

Question 35

I felt that I had something to tell him, something to warn him about and morning would be too late

Answer 35

Ch 8

Question 36

He wouldn‘t consider it. He couldn‘t possible leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn‘t bear to shake him free

Answer 36

Ch 8

Question 37

It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy – it increased her value in his eyes

Answer 37

Ch 8

Question 38

She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby – nothing. He felt married to her, that was all

Answer 38

Ch 8

Question 39

Gatsby 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

Answer 39

Ch 8

Question 40

They‘re a rotten crowd…You‘re worth the whole damn bunch put together.‘ I‘ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end

Answer 40

Ch 8

Question 41

I told her she might be able to fool me but she couldn‘t fool God. I took her to the window…and I said ‗God knows what you‘ve been doing, everything you‘ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can‘t fool God!‘…he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night

Answer 41

Ch 8

Question 42

No phone message arrived…I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn‘t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a
single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky…A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees

Answer 42

Ch 8

Question 43

The laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool…The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of a transit, a thin red circle in the water

Answer 43

Ch 8

Question 44

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life

Answer 44

Ch 9

Question 45

After Gatsby‘s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes‘ power of correction

Answer 45

Ch 9

Question 46

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

Answer 46

Ch 9

Question 47

I thought of Gatsby‘s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy‘s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could barely fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night

Answer 47

Ch 9

Question 48

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 – to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And one fine morning

Answer 48

Ch 9

Question 49

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past

Answer 49

Ch 9