Nick Carraway – Character Quotes

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly.
It was 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, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”

It was all very careless and confused.
They were careless peoples, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…

They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.

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

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

A sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked.
“It’s full of -” I hesitated.
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it… High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl… .