Tom Buchanan Quotes in The Great Gatsby

"Self-control!" repeated Tom incredulously. "I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that's the idea you can count me out … Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they'll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white."

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

"Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg.

The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular cafés with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew.

"It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it."

"We're getting off," he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl."

Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive.

A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom.

Next day at five o'clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a three months' trip to the South Seas.

"I'd like to know who he is and what he does," insisted Tom. "And I think I'll make a point of finding out."