Fitzgerald, however, was keenly aware of the dark side and “great grotesque spectacle” of the Jazz Age. With famous friends like fellow author James Joyce and frenemies like Ernest Hemingway, he saw what it was like to live a high profile, hard drinking life of glamour, wealth and excess. He had a novel-worthy marriage to his wife Zelda; his alcoholism and her struggle with mental health issues (she was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1930) made for a tumultuous love affair. But for The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald reached back to the story of his first love, Ginevra King. King’s family wouldn’t accept him at the time because of his financial status, even though she was madly in love with him.The Great Gatsby tells the story of bootlegger Jay Gatsby, a man who so yearns for the American dream—in the person of wealthy, ex-fiancee Daisy Buchanan—he pays a terrible price. The Great Gatsby has made its way into high schools all over the country as required reading, and most people are familiar with at least one cinematic adaptation of the book—namely, the one directed by Baz Luhrmann that premiered in 2013 with Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan in the lead roles (although another memorable Gatsby movie also came out in 1974 starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow). But get ready for more. The novel’s copyright expired at the end of 2020, which means it is now in the public domain. All kinds of prequels, sequels, spinoffs and re-tellings are on the table. The first work to benefit from Gatsby’s copyright expiration was Nick, written by Michael Farris Smith—and published just five days after Fitzgerald’s work entered the public domain. Nick, a prequel, tells the story of Gatsby narrator Nick Carraway’s adventures in the years before his move to Long Island, NY. Also in the works is a Gatsby television series that aims to “explore its famous and iconic characters through the modern lens of gender, race and sexual orientation.” The show will be working with a Fitzgerald estate trustee Blake Hazard, who just happens to be one of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s great-grandchildren; she’ll be a consulting producer. Hazard was also involved with a graphic novel version of Gatsby that came out in June, writing the introduction. In honor of what would have been F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 125th birthday, here are 125 quotes from The Great Gatsby. “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” “I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” “But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.” “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.” “…but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering.” “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.” “I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed–that voice was a deathless song.” “He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.” “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.” “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.” “He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a ’nice’ girl could be.” “It takes two to make an accident.” “He was his wife’s man and not his own.” “I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.” “Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.” “He was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor.” “We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.” “She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand.” “One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.” “So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.” “After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby’s party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world.” “Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.” “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” “I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.” “He found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.” “The bottle of whiskey—the second one—was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who ‘felt just as good on nothing at all.” “Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.” “A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.” “I hope she’ll be a fool. That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” “When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.” “In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.” “They conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park.” “Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.” “It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.” “We’ll meet you on some corner. I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.” “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.” “Her voice is full of money." “I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.” “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.” “He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.” “The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.” “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.” “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.” “At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” “Oh, you want too much! I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.” “I suppose he smiled at Cody—he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled.” “By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.” “The thing to do is to forget about the heat. You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.” “The rich get richer and the poor get—children.” “Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care.” “He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.” “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” “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.” “Human sympathy has its limits.” “People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.” “Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.” “I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and when she gave me the bill you’d of thought she had my appendix out.” “And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.” “Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.” “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” “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.” “Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.” “It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.” “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.” “Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!” “It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people.” “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” “Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!” “He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.” “I love her and that is the beginning and end of everything.” “God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!” “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.” “Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.” “It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy–it increased her value in his eyes. “Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace.” “For awhile these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.” “I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.” “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.” “The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.” “There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.” “I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused.” “The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself…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.” “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.” “All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don’t come back.” “I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.” “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.” “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.” “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and . . . then retreated back into their money . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” “He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.” “Have you got everything you need in the shape of-of tea?” “My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn.” “Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry… I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.” “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.” “Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year.” “The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.” “I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport.” “There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…” “It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made.” “‘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.’” “His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.” “I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.” “[Tom was] one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterwards savors of anti-climax.” “The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.” “My own rule is to let everything alone.” “He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.” “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.” “It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, 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.” “Their eyes met and they stared together at each other, alone in space.” “For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.” “And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock… Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.” “While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little now and then with gusts of emotion.” “Just as Daisy’s house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.” “Murder your darlings. ” “I found myself on Gatsby’s side and alone.” “I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.” “I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.” “All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.” “It had seemed as close as a star to the moon.” “Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.” “The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption - and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-bye.” “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.” “He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise.” “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” “So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing.” “They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Next, 101 Inspiring Winston Churchill Quotes That Touch On Everything—From Politics to Human Nature
