The Great Gatsby Quotes

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

Her expression was curiously familiar—it was an expression I had often seen on women's faces, but on Myrtle Wilson's face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife.

Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.

It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over.

She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as someone he knew a long time ago.

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

"Even alone I can't say I never loved Tom," she admitted in a pitiful voice. "It wouldn't be true."

Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don't think he had ever really believed in its existence before.

Michaelis and this man reached her first, but when they had torn open her shirtwaist, still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped a little at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

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