F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes

Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.

You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.

The poor son-of-a-bitch.

No—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.

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.

Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.

The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.

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.

So 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.

I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before. She’ll see.

Your wife doesn’t love you. She’s never loved you. She loves me.

He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby—nothing. He felt married to her, that was all.

In any case, it was just personal.

I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

Civilization’s going to pieces. I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things.

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.

And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering—look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby.

I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it, although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun.

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.

Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

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

And Daisy ought to have something in her life.

What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him.