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If you’re a fan of romantic classics, then The Great Gatsby has to be on your list. 

It was one of the first romantic classics I read, and I’ve loved it ever since.

The storyline is so captivating, and it’s one of those books that makes you think long after you finish reading. 

It mixes love, ambition, and tragedy in a way that feels timeless and so real. 

Honestly, it’s a perfect book. It’s got everything – a beautiful love story, drama, heartbreak, and some pretty deep reflections on life.

Meet the Author

The brilliant author behind this masterpiece is F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer who really captured the essence of the 1920s. 

He was born in 1896 and became famous for writing about the Jazz Age, which was full of glitz, glam, and big dreams. 

Fitzgerald’s life wasn’t always easy, but his writing showed the spirit of the time. 

He wrote a few other great books like Tender Is the Night and This Side of Paradise, but The Great Gatsby is by far his most famous. 

Meet the Book

The Great Gatsby is a story about dreams, love, and what happens when we chase something that’s already out of reach. 

It’s set in the 1920s and follows Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire who throws these huge, lavish parties in hopes that Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loves, will come back to him. 

The book is told from the perspective of Nick Carraway, who moves to Long Island and ends up becoming part of Gatsby’s world. 

At first, the book didn’t get the attention it deserved, but over time it’s become a beloved classic. 

It’s a subtle critique of the American Dream and the emptiness that can come with it.

Meet The Main Characters

Now, the characters are what really make this story stand out. 

• Jay Gatsby is a fascinating character. He’s mysterious, passionate, and his love for Daisy is almost obsessive. 

• Daisy, on the other hand, is beautiful but trapped in her own way. She’s married to Tom Buchanan, a wealthy but selfish man. 

• Then there’s Nick Carraway, our narrator, who watches everything unfold. His perspective is key to understanding the drama and heartbreak that happens. 

Best Quotes from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

1. “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”

2. “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.”

3. “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.”

4. “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

5. “It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”

6. “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

7. “Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.”

8. “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.”

9. “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”

10. “Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”

11. “So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing.”

12. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

13. “They were careless people, 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.”

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

15. “You see, I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”

16. “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”

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

18. “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.”

19. “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.”

20. “Can’t repeat the past?… Why of course you can!”

21. “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.”

22. “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

23. “He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”

24. “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

25. “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.”

26. “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”

27. “What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy. “And the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

28. “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.”

29. “He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.”

30. “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.”

31. “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.”

32. “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

33. “Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”

34. “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.”

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

36. “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.”

37. “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.”

38. “His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. 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. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her.”

39. “There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…”

40. “They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

41. “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.”

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

43. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”

44. “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.”

45. “This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”

46. “I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.”

47. “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.”

48. “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.”

49. “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.”

50. “The rich get richer and the poor get—children.”

51. “So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.”

52. “Every one 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.”

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

54. “I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.”

55. “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.”

56. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

57. “I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it.”

58. “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.”

59. “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.”

60. “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

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If you haven’t read it yet, you’ve got to check it out. Trust me, it’s worth every page!

And if you’ve already read it, I’d love to hear what you think! 

Drop a comment below and let’s chat about your take on the book.