Important Quotations Explained
1. I
hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this
world, a beautiful little fool.
2. He
had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance
in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced,
or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then
concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.
It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed
in you as you would like to believe in yourself.
3. 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. 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.
4. That's
my Middle West . . . the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty
dark. . . . 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.
5. 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—tomorrow
we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then
one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against
the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
