The Great Gatsby quotes about desire

Her voice is full of money.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.

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

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. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.

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.

They’re such beautiful shirts. It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.

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.

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 …

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’

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.

I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.

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

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.

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.

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

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.