Quotation
Key Quotes – The Great Gatsby
“it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in
Character or Theme Chapter/Page Reference
Gatsby Chapter 1, pg 8 any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again”
‘signed Jay Gatsby in a majestic hand.”
“somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”
“It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter…What thoroughness! What realism!...
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one
Gatsby
Gatsby
Gatsby’s image and dream
Chapter 3, 43
Chapter 3, pg 45
Chapter 3, pg 46 brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.”
“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.”
“I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.”
“But young men didn’t…drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island
Sound.”
“My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.”
‘He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.”
“Your place looks like the
World’s Fair.”
Gatsby
Gatsby
Gatsby
Gatsby
Gatsby
Gatsby’s house
Chapter 3, 49
Ch 3, pg 49
Ch 3, pg 50
Ch 4, pg 65
Ch 4, pg 76
Ch 5, pg 79

“Gatsby, in a white flannel suit, silver shirt and goldcoloured tie,…”
“He literally glowed; … a new well-being radiated from him.”
“His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”
“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams…because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.
It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.”
“Contemporary legends such as the underground pipe-line to Canada attached themselves to him.”
“He wanted nothing less of
Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.’”
“ ‘Can’t repeat the past?...Why of course you can!’”
“with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so that he gave up, and only the dead dream fought on.”
“So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight – watching over nothing.”
‘they had spent a year in
France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together
“It was a body capable of enormous leverage – a cruel body.”
“Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and
Gatsby
Gatsby
Gatsby and his dream of
Daisy
Gatsby and his dream of
Daisy
Gatsby
Gatsby and Daisy
Gatsby’s dream
Gatsby’s dream
End of the dream for
Gatsby
Tom and Daisy Buchanan
Tom
Tom
Ch 5, pg 81
Ch 5, pg 86
Ch 5, pg 90
Ch 5, pg 92
Ch 6, pg 94
Ch 6, pg 105
Ch 6, pg 106
Ch 7, pg 128
Ch 7 , pg 139
Chapter 1, pg 11
Chapter 1, pg 12
Chapter 7, pg 119

his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control.”
“They were careless people,
Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.”
“She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster.”
“I’d never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a minute she’d look around uneasily.”
“Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all – and yet there’s something in that voice of hers.”
“Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses.”
‘She had told him that she had loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was astounded …and recognized her as someone he knew a long time ago.”
“Her voice is full of money.”
“ I did love him once – but I love you too…Even alone I can’t say I never loved Tom.”
“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
“the death car”
“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.”
Tom and Daisy
Daisy
Daisy
Daisy
Daisy and Jordan
Daisy, Gatsby and Tom
Daisy
Daisy
End of the dream
Class struggle/The
American Dream
Ch 9, pg 170
Chapter 4, pg 73
Ch 4, pg 75
Ch 4, pg 75
Ch 7, pg 110
Ch 7, pg 113
Ch 7, pg 115
Ch 7, pg 126
Ch 7, pg 129,131
Ch 8, pg 142

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”
The myth of the American
Dream
Ch 9, pg 171