59 Great Gatsby Quotes From The Book About Love and Loss

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is an iconic piece of American literature that has shaped the modern fictional genre as we know it today. Readers, dreamers, and writers often turn to Great Gatsby quotes to better understand love, life, and the great human tenderness that comes with moving forward. 

But why is The Great Gatsby so revered?

This classic novel explores life through tragedy and love, and displays the way we see other people in an interesting and complex way, as we see the story through Nick’s eyes instead of Gatsby’s. Throughout the story, Nick describes the life of the wealthy Jay Gatsby throughout the year of 1922 as he romantically pursues the beautiful Daisy Buchanan.

These Great Gatsby quotes will bring you into the world of Gatsby’s elaborate parties and complicated love life, showing you what this book means for the modern human being.

Don’t forget to also read these F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes on love and life.

Great Gatsby Quotes for Understanding Life

1. “Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.” – The Great Gatsby

2. “He found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.” – The Great Gatsby

3. “All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don’t come back.” – The Great Gatsby

4. “‘I’m thirty,’ I said. ‘I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.’” – The Great Gatsby

5. “The rich get richer and the poor get—children.” – The Great Gatsby

6. “Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.” – The Great Gatsby

7. “‘What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?’ cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’” – The Great Gatsby

8. “Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.” – The Great Gatsby

9. “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!” – The Great Gatsby

10. “There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.” – The Great Gatsby

11. “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” – The Great Gatsby

12. “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.” – The Great Gatsby

13. “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” – The Great Gatsby

14. “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.” – The Great Gatsby

15. “All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.” – The Great Gatsby

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Great Gatsby Quotes for When Everything Changes

16. “I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.” – The Great Gatsby

17. “The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.” – The Great Gatsby

18. “Breathing dreams like air.” – The Great Gatsby

19. “Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.” – The Great Gatsby

20. “A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.” – The Great Gatsby

21. “The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.” – The Great Gatsby

22. “It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.” – The Great Gatsby

23. “I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.” – The Great Gatsby

24. “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.” – The Great Gatsby

25. “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.” – The Great Gatsby

26. “They conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park.” – The Great Gatsby

27. “Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.” – The Great Gatsby

28. “You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.” – The Great Gatsby

29. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” – The Great Gatsby

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Great Gatsby Quotes About Love

30. “Their eyes met and they stared together at each other, alone in space.” – The Great Gatsby

31. “I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything.” – The Great Gatsby

32. “You’re very polite, but I belong to another generation.” – The Great Gatsby

33. “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.” – The Great Gatsby

34. “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.” – The Great Gatsby

35. “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.” – The Great Gatsby

36. “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.” – The Great Gatsby

37. “The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.” – The Great Gatsby

38. “…and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.” – The Great Gatsby

39. “He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.” – The Great Gatsby

40. “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.” – The Great Gatsby

41. “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.” – The Great Gatsby

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Great Gatsby Quotes About the Rawness of the Human Heart

42. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” – The Great Gatsby   

43. “It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.” – The Great Gatsby

44. “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 Great Gatsby

45. “It takes two to make an accident.” – The Great Gatsby

46. “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.” – The Great Gatsby

47. “I was too absorbed to be responsive.” – The Great Gatsby

48. “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.” – The Great Gatsby

49. “She was incurably dishonest.” – The Great Gatsby

50. “If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.” – The Great Gatsby

51. “Human sympathy has its limits.” – The Great Gatsby

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More Great Gatsby quotes

52. “The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

53. “Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

53. “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

54. “Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

55. “She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

56. “Whenever you feel like criticising anyone, just remember that all of the people in the world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” – F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

57. “A sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

58. “There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. 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.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

59. “I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby

Which of these Great Gatsby quotes resonated with you best?

The Great Gatsby quotes above truly break open the humanity displayed in this classic American novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story describes the life of the wealthy Jay Gatsby through Nick Carroway’s eyes, examining the complexity of human emotion, love, life, and loss.

So, what can we learn from these sentiments brought up throughout The Great Gatsby? Through these meaningful moments throughout the novel, we can finally grasp the complexity of human emotion through love, observation and loss, as we explore how these characters view life. 

Through The Great Gatsby, readers can hope to understand life as Nick, Gatsby, and Daisy do, exploring the complexity of human nature through wants and dreams, and eventually, moving forward.

What’s your biggest takeaway from these Great Gatsby quotes and lines? Do you have any other favorite quotes to add? Tell us in the comment section below. We would love to hear all about.