The Great Gatsby Characters

“Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven-a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anticlimax. His family were enormously wealthy-even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach-but now he;s left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d bought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.”

“This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it- I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of the some irrecoverable football game.”

“He Had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body-he seemed to fill those glistening books until he stained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved nuder his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage-a cruel body.”

“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously into the fervent sun.”

“Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward[...] the enormous power of that body– he seemed to fill those glistening boots.”

“Well these books are all scientific,” insisted [ ], glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing/ It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

“The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of the wild, unknown men.”

Nick

“Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.”

Nick

“And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.”

Nick

“Only [ ], the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-[ ], who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”

Gatsby

“No-[ ] turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on [ ], what foul dust floated int he wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”

Gatsby

“‘Ah,’ she cried, ‘you look so cool.’ Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. ‘You always look so cool,’ she repeated.”

Gatsby

“‘You resemble the advertisement of the man,” she went on innocently. ‘You know the advertisement of the man-”

Gatsby

“Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering… shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye”

Myrtle

“He was a blond, spiritless man, anemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us, a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.”

“...[he] went towards the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity”

Wilson