Great Gatsby American Dream Quotes

You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning —

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, 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.

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

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.

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.

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.

…I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such–such beautiful shirts before.

he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

Thirty–the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.