The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel of the summer of 1922 on Long Island, told by Nick Carraway, whose mysterious neighbour Jay Gatsby throws lavish parties in the hope of winning back Daisy Buchanan, Nick’s married cousin.

Start reading10 chapters, about 49,000 words

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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.”
Chapter IIn context
- Advice
Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
Chapter IIn context
- Wisdom
I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool⁠—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
Chapter IIn context
- Women
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
Chapter IIIn context
- Experience
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
Chapter IIIIn context
- Entertainment
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
Chapter IVIn context
- Beauty
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.
Chapter IVIn context
- Motivation & Goals
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.
Chapter VIn context
- Love
The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.
Chapter VIIn context
- Character
It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
Chapter VIIn context
- Experience
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
Chapter VIIn context
- Hope
- Time
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. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Chapter VIIn context
- Love
Her voice is full of money
Chapter VIIIn context
- Money
- Women
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.
Chapter VIIIn context
- Health
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind
Chapter VIIIn context
- Intelligence
Thirty⁠—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
Chapter VIIIn context
- Age
They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.
Chapter VIIIIn context
- Friendship
He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.
Chapter VIIIIn context
- Hope
“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he suggested. “After that my own rule is to let everything alone.”
Chapter IXIn context
- Friendship
- Life & Death
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
Chapter IXIn context
- Money
- Responsibility
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic 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 further … And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Chapter IXIn context
- Hope
- Time
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Closing linesIn context
- Time

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