 "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one . . .

just remember that all the people in this

 "…what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my
interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men." Chapter 1

 "I hope she'll be a fool — that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little
fool . . . You see, I think everything's terrible anyhow . . . And I know. I've been
everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Chapter 1

 "Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light,

 "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 men who move dimly and already
crumbling through the powdery air." Chapter 2

 "He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's
alive." Chapter 2

 "I married him because I thought he was a gentleman . . . I thought he knew something
about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe." Chapter 2

 "He borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in, and never told me about it, and the
man came after it one day when he was out . . . I gave it to him and then I lay down and
cried . . . all afternoon." Chapter 2

 "I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who
had actually been invited. People were not invited — they went there." Chapter 3

 "I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a
library." Chapter 3

 "I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — young clerks in the dusk,
wasting the most poignant moments of night and life." Chapter 3

 "It takes two to make an accident." Chapter 3

 "Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am
one of the few honest people that I have ever known." Chapter 3

 "the scene had changed before [his] eyes into something significant, elemental, and
profound." Sober, this scene has no more significance than any other, but through the
haze of alcohol, it seems to become steeped in meaning Chapter 3

 Nick remarks that Gatsby possesses "a quality of eternal reassurance . . . that you may
come across four or five times in life." His smile, Nick asserts, "believed in you as you
 would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of
you that, at your best, you hoped to convey." Chapter 3

 "I belong to another generation . . . As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won't impose
myself on you any longer." Chapter 4

 "'A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: 'There are only the
pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.'" Chapter 4

 "Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply — I was casually sorry, and
then I forgot." Chapter 4

 "Daisy ought to have something in her life," Chapter 4

 "Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was
standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes." Chapter 5

 "Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about
being peasantry." Chapter 5

 "If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay . . . You always have a
green light that burns all night at the end of your dock." Chapter 5

 "without a word or gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled
the little room." Chapter 5

 "You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock." the green
light (representing many things: hope, youth, forward momentum, money) represented a
dream to him and by reaching out to it, he was bringing himself closer to his love Chapter
5

 "His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people — his imagination had never
really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg,
Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God . . .
and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious
beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be
likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end." Chapter 6

 Carraway, always the gentle voice of reason, reminds his friend that the past is in the
past and it can't be resurrected. Most would agree with this, which makes Gatsby's "Why
of course you can!" even more striking. Chapter 6

 "Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their
own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans." Chapter 7

 "I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very
sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your
hands." Chapter 7
 "So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight." Chapter 7

 This is where Nick shows what he's really made of. Rather than accept Tom's invitation,
as expected, he tells the reader "I'd be damned if I'd go in; I'd had enough of all of them
for one day." Chapter 7

 "It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy — it increased her value in
his eyes." Chapter 8

 Wilson explains the purpose of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg's enormous eyes. They are the eyes
of God, and "God sees everything." Chapter 8

 As Nick says, Gatsby "must have felt that he had lost the old warm world" when his
dream died, and found no reason to go on. Chapter 8

 "When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out. When I
was a young man it was different . . . I stuck with them to the end . . . Let us learn to
show friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead." Chapter 9

 "After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes'
power of correction." Chapter 9

 "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and
then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that
kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Chapter 9

 Nick finds Gatz "walking up and down excitedly in the hall. His pride in his son and in
his son's possessions was continually increasing." Apparently Gatz, like so many others,
measured Gatsby's merit not on the type of man he was, but on his possessions. Chapter 9

 "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before
us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our
arms farther . . . . And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past." Chapter 9