Quotes from work
The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby is an opera in two acts written by American composer John Harbison. The libretto, also by Harbison, was adapted from the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Additional popular song lyrics were by Murray Horwitz. The opera was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in honor of music director James Levine's 25th anniversary with the company.

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Variant: You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.
Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining."
I’m glad Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“The rich get richer and the poor get - children.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“They were careless people… 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….”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Variant: 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.
Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby