Money is a huge motivator for the characters in The Great Gatsby.
Jay Gatsby wants to be rich so badly that he’ll do anything to achieve his goal…even if it means sacrificing his happiness and ruining other people’s lives.
For Daisy Buchanan, money represents security and status. She comes from a wealthy family and married into wealth, so she’s never had to worry about money or work for anything.
She’s never had to worry about where her next meal will come from or whether she can afford a new dress for a party.
For Tom Buchanan, money is all about power and control. He comes from an old-money family and wants to ensure everyone knows this.
Like his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, Tom uses wealth to buy things that make him look good and feel powerful.
And for Nick Carraway, money represents the American dream.
The Great Gatsby Quotes With Page Numbers
The Great Gatsby Quotes About Money With Page Numbers
“When I came back from the East last autumn 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. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 4
“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, about money and Tom Buchanan (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 9
“I lived at West Egg, the – well, the least fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard … My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires – all for eighty dollars a month.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 9
“Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. 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 some irrecoverable football game.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 10
“His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked – and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 10
“I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything…Sophisticated — God, I’m sophisticated! ”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Daisy Buchanan), Chapter 1, Page 16
“This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 2, Page 19
“Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 2, Page 21
“I married [George] because I thought he was a gentleman,” she said finally. “I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Myrtle Wilson), Chapter 2, Pages 25-26
“I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and never told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out…I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried…all afternoon.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Myrtle Wilson), Chapter 2, Page 26
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
~Fitzgerald F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 2, Page 26
“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 he 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 motor-boats slid 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.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 28
“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, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 28
“Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And 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, (Characters: Jordan Baker and Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 30
“‘I like to come,’ Lucille said. ‘I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked me my name and address – inside of a week I got a package from Croirier’s with a new evening gown in it.’
‘Did you keep it?’ asked Jordan.
‘Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars.’”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Characters: Lucille and Jordan Baker), Chapter 3, Page 30
“‘See!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too – didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?’”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Owl-eyed man in Gatsby’s library), .Chapter 3, Page 32
“I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people – with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 47
“By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Jordan Baker), Chapter 4, Page 48
“‘Here, deares’. She groped around in a waste-basket she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. ‘Take ’em down-stairs and give ’em back to whoever they belong to. Tell ’em all Daisy’s change’ her mind. Say: ‘Daisy’s change’ her mine!’”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Daisy Buchanan), Chapter 4, Page 48
“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 56
“‘I thought you inherited your money.’
‘I did, old sport,’ he said automatically, ‘but I lost most of it in the big panic – the panic of the war.’
I think he hardly knew what he was saying, for when I asked him what business he was in he answered, ‘That’s my affair,’ before he realized that it wasn’t the appropriate reply.
‘Oh, I’ve been in several things,’ he corrected himself. ‘I was in the drug business and then I was in the oil business. But I’m not in either one now.’”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator and Jay Gatsby), Chapter 5, Page 57
“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. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 58
“Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the think folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.’”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Characters: Nick Carraway as the narrator and Daisy Buchanan), Chapter 5, Page 58
“One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer
The rich get richer and the poor get – children.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Characters: Nick and Daisy), Chapter 5, Page 60
“I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby’s bedroom, a gray, florid man with a hard, empty face.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 6, Page 64
“She was appalled by West Egg…by its raw vigor that chafed…and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 6, Page 68
“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, about Daisy (Characters: Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby), Chapter 7, Page 75
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your lunch,” he said. “But I need money pretty bad, and I was wondering what you were going to do with your old car.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: George Wilson), Chapter 7, Page 77
“‘I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out….Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.’”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Daisy (Characters: Tom Buchanan), Chapter 7, Page 81
“‘They’re a rotten crowd,’ I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’
I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway to Jay Gatsby), Chapter 8, Page 95
“There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other with little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water.
It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 8, Page 99
“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, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 109
What does The Great Gatsby say about money?
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald suggests that money does not always lead to happiness. The novel portrays the characters’ obsession with wealth and material possessions but ultimately shows that these things do not bring fulfillment or satisfaction.
The characters’ pursuit of money and status leads to corruption, betrayal, and tragedy.
What is the quote about Daisy loving money?
“Her voice is full of money,” …
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, about Daisy (Characters: NIck Carraway and Jay Gatsby), Chapter 7, Page 75
Why does Gatsby say Daisy is full of money?
Gatsby says Daisy is full of money because he recognizes the importance of wealth in Daisy’s life. Her voice is described as having the charm and melody of money, which is the key to her heart.
The entire plot of The Great Gatsby revolves around money, and Daisy marries Tom because he can provide her with an affluent lifestyle.
Why is Gatsby obsessed with money?
Gatsby is obsessed with money because he believes it’s the key to winning Daisy’s love. Gatsby knows that Daisy values wealth and status, so he’s spent his entire life accumulating money and material possessions to impress her.
Despite his immense wealth, Gatsby is still unhappy and unfulfilled because he can’t have the one thing he truly desires – Daisy’s love.
Does Gatsby love Daisy or her money?
Gatsby’s love for Daisy seems genuine. He has spent his entire life trying to win her back, even after she married Tom. He recognizes that Daisy’s love for money caused her to marry Tom, but he still believes he can win her over with his wealth and status.
Because Gatsby was poor when he met her, his obsession with Daisy could also be partially driven by his desire for social status and the validation of being with a woman of Daisy’s standing.