Great Gatsby American Dream Quotes

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

Thirty–the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!

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.

What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

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

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 – to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning —

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.

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

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.

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one… just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such–such beautiful shirts before.

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.

I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and 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. [- Nick Carroway]