The Great Gatsby quotes Flashcards
‘It was Gatsby’s mansion’
‘colossal affair … imitation … spanking new …thin beard of raw ivy … marble swimming pool.
vs. ‘A Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay’ - Buchanans house
Gatsby’s isolation
first description = ‘content to be alone’ … hand ‘trembling’ towards ‘a single green light’
‘standing alone on the marble steps’ at his parties
Valley of Ashes propaganda
Doctor TJ Ecklesburg is described as wearing ‘a pair of enormous yellow spectacles’
‘enormous’
‘powdery air’
‘a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat’
‘men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.’
Gatsby’s party description
servants, oranges, caterers
servants repairing the ravages of the night before. […] Every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in pyramids of pulpless halves. […] Once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down.
Love quotes
Myrtle - ‘I married him because I thought he was a gentleman’
Nick on Jordan - ‘I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.’
Gatsby for Daisy - ‘His mind would never romp again like the mind of God
Daisy to Gatsby and Tom - “I did love him once – but I love you too.”
Myrtle’s apartment with Tom
‘small living-room, small dining-room, small bedroom … crowded to the doors … furniture entirely too large for it.’
Gatsby’s persona
Even Gatsby could happen
‘Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay … he came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.’
Pursuit quote
‘There was only the pursued, the pursuing, and the tired.’
[Wilson is tired and pursues his wife]
Wilson = ‘colourless … one of these worn out men.’
Gatsby’s meet with Daisy versus the first time they kissed
‘Gatsby was smiling like a weatherman’ = can’t repeat the past
she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete’ = simile is the birth of his fantasy
‘His mind would never romp again like the mind of God’
Daisy’s marriage to Tom
‘hulking … brute of a man’
the incident was over … she married Tom without so much as a shiver.
Gatsby versus Tom
“I did love him once – but I love you too.”
Tom who ‘exploded’ when speaking: ‘said Gatsby with a touch of panic’ vs. Tom could ‘afford to control himself now’ as Daisy said she once loved him
Myrtle’s death
‘Left breast was swinging loose like a flap she had choked a little and giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long’ = sexualised death
- death of the American Dream
‘Mingled her thick dark blood with the dust.’
her life violently extinguished
Character’s reaction to Myrtle’s death
“They weren’t happy … and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy. They were conspiring together.”
+ ‘they were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and they retreated back into their money and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’
‘Wealth imprisons and preserves’ - Daisy is trapped by cozy with money
‘Jay Gatsby had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice.’ - Death of the American Dream as his persona is dead due to fragility like glass + ‘a new world where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air drifted.’
Gatsby’s death and funeral
Gatsby’s father states - ‘Gatz is my name’ = distance from son’s persona - at funeral as ‘nobody came.’ - ‘Daisy hadn’t sent a message or a flower.’
vs. “his pride and his son and in his son’s possessions was continually increasing …. he knew he had a big future in front of him” = he practised for success - ‘practice elocution and poise’ written in timetable.
“They used to go there by the hundreds!”
The Failure of the American Dream
Myrtle’s death: ‘her life violently extinguished’
Gatsby’s death:
- his house: once ‘colossal’ now it has become a ‘huge incoherent failure of a house once more.’
“his dreams must have seemed so close that he could finally fail to grasp it.
He did not know that it was already behind him …
Gatsby believed in the green light […]
tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further …. and one fine morning-so we beat on, both against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
