Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, gives a unique perspective of the 1920s.
Although he isn’t wealthy, he’s in the inner circle of the wealthy.
Nick’s observations of Jay Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Jordan Baker warn of the dark side of the American Dream.
The Great Gatsby Quotes With Page Numbers
Who is Nick Carraway?
Nick Carraway narrates F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby. He is not the protagonist but rather an observer of the story’s events.
Nick is an unreliable narrator, meaning he doesn’t always tell the truth about what is happening. He is originally from the Midwest but lives in New York and studies the bond business.
Nick is a moral character who often tries to define his own sense of right and wrong. He is a loyal friend to Gatsby and a witness to the novel’s tragic events.
He is a complex character, open to new experiences and ideas, yet still holds onto his Midwestern values.
Quotes from Nick Carraway with page numbers and chapters.
Nick Carraway Chapter 1 Quotes
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway quoting his father), Chapter 1, Page 7
“the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 7
“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.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 7
“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 7
“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 7
“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.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 8
“I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 8
“There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 8
“Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 9
“one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty−one that everything afterward savors of anti−climax.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 9
“Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 11
“The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise–she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression–then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.
‘I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.’
She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator and Daisy Buchanan), Chapter 1, Page 11
“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.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 14
“As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 18
Nick Carraway Chapter 2 Quotes
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
~Fitzgerald F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 2, Page 26
“All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 2, Page 26
Nick Carraway Chapter 3 Quotes
“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 28
“There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.
Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York–every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.
At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.
By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.
Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Pages 28, 29
“It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 31
“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. 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. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 33
“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I like to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 38
“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.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 38
“Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 38
“I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 38
“Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 39
“I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway to Jordan Baker) , Chapter 3, Page 39
“…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”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 39
“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.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 39
Nick Carraway Chapter 4 Quotes
“So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate road-house next door.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 42
“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, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 44
“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.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator about Daisy and Jay Gatsby), Chapter 4, Page 48
“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 49
“Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 50
“He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths – so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 50
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 50
“Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 51
Nick Carraway Chapter 5 Quotes
“The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 54
“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 56
“He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 58
“The rich get richer and the poor get – children.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Characters: Nick and Daisy), Chapter 5, Page 60
“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 60
“His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed —that voice was a deathless song.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 60
Nick Carraway Chapter 6 Quotes
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 6, Page 62
“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, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 6, Page 66
“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. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 6, Page 70
Nick Carraway Chapter 7 Quotes
“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of–” I hesitated.
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money–that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (NIck Carraway and Jay Gatsby), Chapter 7, Page 75
“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.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway), Chapter 7, Page 77
“There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway), Chapter 7, Page 78
“Want any of this stuff? Jordan?… Nick?”
I didn’t answer.
Nick?” he asked again.
What?”
Want any?”
No… I just remembered that today’s my birthday.”
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Tom Buchanan and Nick Carraway), Chapter 7, Page 84
“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. 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. No–Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 7, Page 84
“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 7, Page 84
Nick Carraway Chapter 8 Quotes
“He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a ‘nice’ girl could be.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 8, Page 92
“I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. . . . Well, there I was, ‘way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?” On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy in his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day, with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his arm a little, and once he kissed her dark shining hair. 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. They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 8, Pages 92, 93
“all the time something within her was crying for a decision.
She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator about Daisy), Chapter 8, Page 93
“She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 8, Page 93
“He snatched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his burred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 8, Page 94
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted, across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway to Jay Gatsby), Chapter 8, Page 95
“The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption – and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 8, Page 95
“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. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 8, Page 99
Nick Carraway Chapter 9 Quotes
“At first I was surprised and confused; then as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or speak hour upon hour it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested–interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 100
“He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 102
“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That’s my middle-west – not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 107
“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to makes such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person I thought it was your secret pride.”
“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”
She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Jordan Baker and Nick Carraway), Chapter 9, Page 108
“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.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 109
“And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes–a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; 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.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 110
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic 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 farther…. And one fine morning– So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 110
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 110
Nick Carraway Judgemental Quotes
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway quoting his father), Chapter 1, Page 7
“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.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 7
“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 7
Nick Describing Gatsby Quotes
“Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and shortwinded elations of men.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator about Gatsby), Chapter 1, Pages 7-8
“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. 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. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Caraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 33
“I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Caraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 33
“Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Jay Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 50
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted, across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway to Jay Gatsby), Chapter 8, Page 95
“He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. 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, about Gatsby, (Nick Carraway), Chapter 5, Page 58
“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!” He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby), Chapter 6, Page 69
“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.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway about Gatsby), Chapter 9, Page 110
“He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway about Gatsby), Chapter 4, Page 41
What were Nick’s last words to Gatsby?
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted, across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”…
“Good-by,” I called. “I enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Caraway), Chapter 8, Page 95
What is Nick Carraway a symbol of?
Nick Carraway symbolizes moral complexity, the struggle between the American Dream of wealth and success, and the moral decay that often comes with it. His inner conflicts between these two realities represent the conflicts of the time.
Which quote proves that Nick is Judgemental?
The quote, “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (Chapter 3, Page 39), proves that Nick is judgemental, as he views himself as having a cardinal virtue many others lack.
What quote most shows Nick’s bias for Gatsby?
The quote from Nick that most shows his bias for Gatsby is, “He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was…”
Nick admires Gatsby’s desire to reclaim his past and sees the good in him despite the chaos surrounding him since his relationship with Daisy.
Why is Nick a biased narrator?
Nick is biased because he presents events out of order, obscures the truth, and has a personal connection to the people he is narrating about. Additionally, he often presents the story through his own filter and can be swayed by his emotions.
Sources Cited