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In its words

The Great Gatsby quotes about mortality

10 quotes on mortality from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, each verified verbatim against the text and located in the book. Drawn from the 87 in the full collection.

Cover of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

About F. Scott Fitzgerald

Illustrated portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald

8 books shelved

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.
Meyer Wolfshiem (dialogue) · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter 9
Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
Nick (narration) · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter 7
If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.
Nick (narration) · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter 8
I’m thirty. I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour.
Nick Carraway (dialogue) · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter 9
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
Nick (narration) · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter 7
This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
Nick (narration) · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter 2
All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’
Myrtle Wilson (dialogue) · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter 2
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.
Nick (narration) · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter 7
The poor son-of-a-bitch.
Owl-eyes (dialogue) · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter 9
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.
Nick (narration) · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter 8

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