Here are the 145 best handpicked quotes from “The Great Gatsby” by Scott Fitzgerald:
From quotes by Jay Gatsby to quotes by Nick Carraway to quotes by Daisy Buchanan.
So if you want the best quotes from “The Great Gatsby” sorted by figure, then you’re in the right place.
Let’s get started!
My Favorite “The Great Gatsby” Quote
#1
“All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don’t come back.”
— Daisy Buchanan
This quote from the classic “The Great Gatsby” is a beautiful reminder of the fleeting things and moments in our lives and how none of the fancy things we deem precious to us will last a lifetime.
While this quote is simple but it carries a magnifying message that we should all savor the moments, big or small, we share with ourselves or with the people we love the most knowing that these moments are fleeting and once gone, we can never go back to them again.
9 Quotes by Jay Gatsby
#2
“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”
— Jay Gatsby
#3
“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.”
— Jay Gatsby
#4
“Her voice is full of money.”
— Jay Gatsby
#5
“Have you got everything you need in the shape of-of tea?”
— Jay Gatsby
#6
“I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport.”
— Jay Gatsby
#7
“Of course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they were first married— and loved me more even then, do you see?”
— Jay Gatsby
#8
“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
— Jay Gatsby
#9
“Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care.”
— Jay Gatsby
#10
“Your wife doesn’t love you,” said Gatsby. “She’s never loved you. She loves me.”
— Jay Gatsby
105 Quotes by Nick Carraway
#11
“But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.”
— Nick Carraway
#12
“There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…”
— Nick Carraway
#13
“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.”
— Nick Carraway
#14
“‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”
— Nick Carraway
#15
“His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.”
— Nick Carraway
#16
“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.”
— Nick Carraway
#17
“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.”
— Nick Carraway
#18
“He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise.”
— Nick Carraway
#19
“I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
— Nick Carraway
#20
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
— Nick Carraway
#21
“’They’re a rotten crowd,’ I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’”
— Nick Carraway
#22
“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.”
— Nick Carraway
#23
“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.”
— Nick Carraway
#24
“For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened – then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.”
— Nick Carraway
#25
“Tom was one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterwards savors of anti-climax.”
— Nick Carraway
#26
“It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made.”
— Nick Carraway
#27
“It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.”
— Nick Carraway
#28
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
— Nick Carraway
#29
“It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”
— Nick Carraway
#30
“Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”
— Nick Carraway
#31
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
— Nick Carraway
#32
“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.”
— Nick Carraway
#33
“The bottle of whiskey—the second one—was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who ‘felt just as good on nothing at all.”
— Nick Carraway
#34
“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”
— Nick Carraway
#35
“She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.”
— Nick Carraway
#36
“Thirty–the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”
— Nick Carraway
#37
“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.”
— Nick Carraway
#38
“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
— Nick Carraway
#39
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
— Nick Carraway
#40
“I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
— Nick Carraway
#41
“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.”
— Nick Carraway
#42
“People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.”
— Nick Carraway
#43
“He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a ‘nice’ girl could be.”
— Nick Carraway
#44
“His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.”
— Nick Carraway
#45
“It was curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night— and as obscurely as it begun, his career as Trimalchio was over.”
— Nick Carraway
#46
“Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”
— Nick Carraway
#47
“He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.”
— Nick Carraway
#48
“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
— Nick Carraway
#49
“The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.”
— Nick Carraway
#50
“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.”
— Nick Carraway
#51
“Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year.”
— Nick Carraway
#52
“My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn.”
— Nick Carraway
#53
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
— Nick Carraway
#54
“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.”
— Nick Carraway
#55
“At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”
— Nick Carraway
#56
“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”
— Nick Carraway
#57
“He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths – so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.”
— Nick Carraway
#58
“He was his wife’s man and not his own.”
— Nick Carraway
#59
“You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy.”
— Nick Carraway
#60
“…but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering.”
— Nick Carraway
#61
“In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.”
— Nick Carraway
#62
“He was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor.”
— Nick Carraway
#63
“When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.”
— Nick Carraway
#64
“A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.”
— Nick Carraway
#65
“He found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”
— Nick Carraway
#66
“The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption – and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-bye.”
— Nick Carraway
#67
“It had seemed as close as a star to the moon.”
— Nick Carraway
#68
“So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight – watching over nothing.”
— Nick Carraway
#69
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself…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.”
— Nick Carraway
#70
“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people.”
— Nick Carraway
#71
“He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.”
— Nick Carraway
#72
“I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed–that voice was a deathless song.”
— Nick Carraway
#73
“So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.”
— Nick Carraway
#74
“After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby’s party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world.”
— Nick Carraway
#75
“She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand.”
— Nick Carraway
#76
“We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.”
— Nick Carraway
#77
“Their eyes met and they stared together at each other, alone in space.”
— Nick Carraway
#78
“Human sympathy has its limits.”
— Nick Carraway
#79
“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.”
— Nick Carraway
#80
“I suppose he smiled at Cody—he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled.”
— Nick Carraway
#81
“I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.”
— Nick Carraway
#82
“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
— Nick Carraway
#83
“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
— Nick Carraway
#84
“And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.”
— Nick Carraway
#85
“He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly 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.”
— Nick Carraway
#86
“Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.”
— Nick Carraway
#87
“Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.”
— Nick Carraway
#88
“I found myself on Gatsby’s side and alone.”
— Nick Carraway
#89
“Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.”
— Nick Carraway
#90
“While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little now and then with gusts of emotion.”
— Nick Carraway
#91
“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
— Nick Carraway
#92
“Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
— Nick Carraway
#93
“He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”
— Nick Carraway
#94
“The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.”
— Nick Carraway
#95
“It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.”
— Nick Carraway
#96
“Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.”
— Nick Carraway
#97
“They conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park.”
— Nick Carraway
#98
“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock… Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”
— Nick Carraway
#99
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and then retreated back into their money . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
— Nick Carraway
#100
“There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.”
— Nick Carraway
#101
“Just as Daisy’s house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.”
— Nick Carraway
#102
“He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.”
— Nick Carraway
#103
“I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.”
— Nick Carraway
#104
“I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”
— Nick Carraway
#105
“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
— Nick Carraway
#106
“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused.”
— Nick Carraway
#107
“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
— Nick Carraway
#108
“I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”
— Nick Carraway
#109
“Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace.”
— Nick Carraway
#110
“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.”
— Nick Carraway
#111
“Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more but of this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm.”
— Nick Carraway
#112
“The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.”
— Nick Carraway
#113
“For awhile these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”
— Nick Carraway
#114
“It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy–it increased her value in his eyes.”
— Nick Carraway
#115
“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.”
— Nick Carraway
6 Quotes by Tom Buchanan
#116
“Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.”
— Tom Buchanan
#117
“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry… I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”
— Tom Buchanan
#118
“The thing to do is to forget about the heat. You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.”
— Tom Buchanan
#119
“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.”
— Tom Buchanan
#120
“I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.”
— Tom Buchanan
#121
“‘Who is this Gatsby anyhow?’ demanded Tom suddenly ‘Some big bootlegger?'”
— Tom Buchanan
6 Quotes by Jordan Baker
#122
“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
— Jordan Baker
#123
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
— Jordan Baker
#124
“Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.”
— Jordan Baker
#125
“I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”
— Jordan Baker
#126
“It takes two to make an accident.”
— Jordan Baker
#127
“I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”
— Jordan Baker
1 Quote by George Wilson
#128
“God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!”
— George Wilson
2 Quotes by Meyer Wolfsheim
#129
“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
— Meyer Wolfsheim
#130
“My own rule is to let everything alone.”
— Meyer Wolfsheim
3 Quotes by Myrtle Wilson
#131
“All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.”
— Myrtle Wilson
#132
“I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and when she gave me the bill you’d of thought she had my appendix out.”
— Myrtle Wilson
#133
“‘My dear,’ she told her sister in a high, mincing shout, ‘most of these fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money.'”
— Myrtle Wilson
8 Quotes by Daisy Buchanan
#134
“Do you always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!”
— Daisy Buchanan
#135
“‘We haven’t met for many years,’ said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be.
‘Five years next November.'”
— Daisy Buchanan
#136
“’What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?’ cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’”
— Daisy Buchanan
#137
“I hope she’ll be a fool. That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
— Daisy Buchanan
#138
“’They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.’”
— Daisy Buchanan
#139
“Oh, you want too much! I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.”
— Daisy Buchanan
#140
“We’ll meet you on some corner. I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.”
— Daisy Buchanan
#141
“I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.”
— Daisy Buchanan
4 Quotes by No Specific Figure
#142
“The rich get richer and the poor get—children.”
— The Great Gatsby
#143
“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
— The Great Gatsby
#144
“One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.”
— The Great Gatsby
#145
“‘You must know Gatsby.‘
‘Gatsby?’ demanded Daisy. ‘What Gatsby?'”
— The Great Gatsby