Jay Gatsby Quotes

“It starts so young, and I'm angry about that. The garbage we're taught. About love, about what's "romantic." Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop and think how many of them would cause serious and drastic unhappiness after The End? Why are sick and dangerous personality types so often shown a passionate and tragic and something to be longed for when those are the very ones you should run for your life from? Think about it. Heathcliff. Romeo. Don Juan. Jay Gatsby. Rochester. Mr. Darcy. From the rigid control freak in The Sound of Music to all the bad boys some woman goes running to the airport to catch in the last minute of every romantic comedy. She should let him leave. Your time is so valuable, and look at these guys--depressive and moody and violent and immature and self-centered. And what about the big daddy of them all, Prince Charming? What was his secret life? We dont know anything about him, other then he looks good and comes to the rescue.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“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 external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.”
― F Scott Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

“Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“They saw me. Milton's smile curled off his face like unsticky tape. And I knew immediately, I was a boy band, a boondoggle, born fool. He was going to pull a Danny Zuko in Grease when Sandy says hello to him in front of the T-Birds, a Mrs. Robinson when she tells Elaine she didn't seduce Benjamin, a Daisy when she chooses Tom with the disposition of a sour kiwi over Gatsby, a self-made man, a man engorged with dreams, who didn't mind throwing a pile of shirts around a room if he wanted too.

My heart landslided. My legs earthquaked.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“In my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.”
― Donna Tartt

“Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Something in his leisurely move- ments and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to deter- mine what share was his of our local heavens.”
― Francis Scott Fitzgerald

“Jay would return to New York one day. When he did, he would make something of himself--not by way of luck or happenstance, but by means of his own industry. One day he would make New York his own. This indisputabe fact was his inescapable destiny. Only, he wasn't quite ready for that--not yet.”
― R.M. Spencer, Agent Gatz: A Great Gatsby Prequel

“A place of literary canon wasn't a guarantee unless you tapped into something deeper, and Jay's longing was drawn from the deepest well of all...”
― Lilith Saintcrow, Spring's Arcana

“No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock - until long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. 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 through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how now the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about... like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding towards him through amorphous trees. - (Page 132)”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gastby