The Great Gatsby Quotes Flashcards
Nick Carraway
“I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”
“Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.”
“I’m inclined to reserve all judgements”
“life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.”
Jay Gatsby
“He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.”
“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-”
“I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it [the phonecall] 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 invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
Daisy Buchanan
“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”
“‘All right,’ I said, ‘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’”
“’Oh, you want too much!’ she cried to Gatsby. ‘I love you now – isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.’ She began to sob helplessly. ’I did love him once,’ she says, ‘but I loved you too’”
Tom Buchanan
“Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face, and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward […] It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.”
“‘If we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged’”
Jordan Baker
“She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face.”
“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.”
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
George Wilson
“He had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life apart from him in another world, and the shock had made him physically sick.”
“’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!’”
Myrtle Wilson
“’I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’’”
“’These people! You have to keep after them all the time.’”
“‘Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai-“/ Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.”
