The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. 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 eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so 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.

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. Sometimes too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.

Gatsby’s eyes floated toward her. “Ah,” she cried, “you look so cool.” Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. “You always look so cool,” she repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of—” I hesitated. “Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. 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… High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…

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.

What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?”

“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,”

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…