Over spring break, I sat down to reread one of my favorite books and all-time classic, The Great Gatsby. As I flew through the chapters, I was reminded of one of the many reasons why this book has stood the test of time – the way that F. Scott Fitzgerald managed to effortlessly string together words into sentences, in a way that elicits an intangible, emotional response. There is something so undeniably beautiful about the words he chooses to use that I decided to compile a list of my favorite quotes. Here’s my top 20 excerpts that’ll guarantee you an emotional response.
1. “‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”
2. “Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”
3. “‘Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.’”
4. “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dream—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.”
5. “One emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.”
6. “It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expanded your own powers of adjustment.”
7. “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
8. “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
9. “Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
10. “There was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.”
11. “It takes two to make an accident.”
12. “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.”
13. “Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”
14. “His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.”
15. “I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy.”
16. “He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence, none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.”
17. “Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.’”
18. “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
19. “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
20. “It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”