The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel about morality and materialism in 'The Jazz Age,' and everyone's favorite novel from 10th-grade English.

"Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe."

"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

"Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me."

"I am not even faintly like a rose."
"Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at the table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one, and yet to avoid all eyes."

"'We heard it from three people, so it must be true.'"

"Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air."

"All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.'"

"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."

"'I've been drunk for about a week, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.'"

"'And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.'"

"At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."

"I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity."

"Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply--I was casually sorry, and then I forgot."

"'It takes two to make an accident.'"

"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."

"I had talked with him perhaps six times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say."

"'You see, I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.'"

"It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care."

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

"'I know I'm not very popular. I don't give big parties. I suppose you've got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends--in the modern world.'"

"So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight."

"She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her..."

"She was feeling the pressure of the world outside, and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all."

"Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old--even then it had always for me a quality of distortion."

"'I don't give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while.'"

"'I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.'"