There aren’t too many books out there that could brag and say, “Yeah, I defined an era.” Among these few chosen ones is The Great Gatsby, a novel that everyone has read or at least heard about.
Its story is an interesting one: When F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925, it didn’t get the success it has today and was actually deemed a disappointment compared to his previous works. When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he considered himself a failure. But during World War II, the Council on Books in Wartime decided to distribute free copies of the novel to American soldiers, which led to a surge in popularity and a re-evaluation of the book. The result? The Great Gatsby was included in every US high school curriculum and became essential to American literature.
Fitzgerald’s writing style is fluid and easy to follow, but at the same time, it’s meant to be savored, to make you pause and reflect. Though the central plot might seem like a romance — with Nick Carraway narrating the story of millionaire Jay Gatsby and his deep love for Daisy Buchanan — it’s actually more nuanced than that. The way it explores social class issues, gender, race, environmentalism, and the cynical criticism of the American Dream makes this book an unmissable gem.
And like every great piece of literature, the number of symbolic quotes in it is incredible. We have collected the best quotes from The Great Gatsby that will make you want to look at it again and will stay with you long after you finish reading.
#1
“Human sympathy has its limits.”
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#2
“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
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#3
“I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
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#4
“I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything.”
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#5
“I wish I’d done everything on Earth with you.”
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#6
“It takes two to make an accident.”
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#7
“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.”
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#8
“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
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#9
“Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”
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#10
“Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.”
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#11
"I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone, and yet to avoid all eyes."
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#12
“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
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#13
“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.”
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#14
“They conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park.”
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#15
“He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”
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#16
“The thing to do is to forget about the heat. You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.”
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#17
“Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.”
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#18
“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.”
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#19
“‘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.’”
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#20
“All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’”
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