"My God, I believe the man's coming," said Tom. "Doesn't he know she doesn't want him?"

“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 …”

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

“I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.”

“My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.”

“The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer.”

“This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.”

"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly.

"Was Daisy driving?" "Yes," he said after a moment, "but of course I'll say I was."

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

“That's my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.”

“It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.”