One thing that makes The Great Gatsby so special is its exploration of the past.
Even the wealthy value their humble beginnings to the luxurious present.
Set during the Roaring Twenties, Fitzgerald expertly captures both the excitement and danger of a time defined by progress and change.
For fans of The Great Gatsby, these quotes about the past and future provide a fascinating glimpse into Fitzgerald’s thoughts on time, memory, and the human experience.
The Great Gatsby Quotes With Page Numbers
The Great Gatsby Past and Future Theme
The theme of past and future is significant in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” This theme projects a conceptual framework for the novel’s key narrative elements and character developments.
Many characters show an intriguing blend of nostalgia and anticipation, forever trapped between an unchangeable past and an uncertain future. Jay Gatsby embodies this struggle most notably.
In Chapter 1 (Page 18), Nick Carraway, the narrator, observes Gatsby reaching out towards a distant green light across the water – a symbol of the past that Gatsby longs to repossess. This longing is for Daisy Buchanan, encapsulated in Gatsby’s image of the green light at the dock of Daisy’s residence.
In Chapter 5 (Page 60), Fitzgerald brilliantly captures Gatsby’s struggle between the past and the future, presenting Gatsby’s outlook as illusionary. Gatsby’s dreams of Daisy often “tumbled short,” not from Daisy’s inadequacies but due to Gatsby’s idealization of the past.
Gatsby’s intense desire to recreate the past is demonstrated in Chapter 6 (Page 69), where he desires nothing less from Daisy than for her to deny her love for Tom and obliterate their union as if it never happened.
This is again referenced in Gatsby’s incredulous response to Carraway’s warning, ‘You can’t repeat the past.’ Gatsby passionately responds, ‘ Why, of course you can!’ suggesting he’s trapped in the past’s allure and seeking to reconnect with lost time.
This dominating theme of past and future is echoed in the novel’s final lines, Chapter 9, Page 110: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Here, Fitzgerald encapsulates the human experience as striving forward yet paradoxically being pulled back by the weight of the past.
Gatsby’s death ultimately embodies this struggle, powerfully commenting on the inherent tragedy of being captive to one’s past while shaping the future.
Adding to that, Daisy Buchanan’s character exudes a sense of someone vacillating between nostalgia and the next big adventure.
Her statements in Chapter 1 underline the theme: she always misses the longest day of the year (Page 13) and declares herself sophisticated for having seen and done everything (Page 16).
Finally, Fitzgerald seems to illustrate that while the past provides context and shapes us, it can also imprison us if we let it wield undue power over our direction.
This theme, interwoven with every narrative strand and character development in The Great Gatsby, presents a timeless exploration of human nature, aspirations, and limitations, making it a touchstone of 20th-century American literature.
The Great Gatsby Quotes About The Past and Future
“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, about Jay Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Pages 7, 8
“Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one 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 savors of anti-climax. […] 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, about the past, Tom and Daisy Buchanan (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Pages 7, 8
“Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Daisy Buchanan), Chapter 1, Page 13
“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, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 14
“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
“…he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 18
“But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 2, Page 19
“I’ll tell you God’s truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West — all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”
He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it or choked on it as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt his whole statement fell to pieces and I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him after all.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Jay Gatsby to Nick Carraway), Chapter 4, Page 42
“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Jay Gatsby to Nick Carraway), Chapter 4, Page 43
“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, (Character: 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, about Jay Gatsby and Daisy (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 48
“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, about Jay Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 50
“It was a strange coincidence,” I said.
“But it wasn’t a coincidence at all.”
“Why not?”
“Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Jay Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker), Chapter 4, Page 50
“They were sitting at either end of the couch looking at each other as if some question had been asked or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy’s face was smeared with tears and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Jay Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Pages 56, 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, about Jay Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 58
“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 over-wound clock.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Jay Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 58
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Daisy Buchanan), Chapter 5, Page 58
“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, about Jay Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 60
“As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! 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, about Jay Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 60
“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. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Jay Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 6, Page 62
“For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Jay Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 6, Pages 62, 63
“I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Daisy and Jay Jatsby (Character: Tom Buchanan), Chapter 6, Pages 65, 66
“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, about Daisy (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 6, Page 66
“He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house—just as if it were five years ago. ”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Jay Gatsby), Chapter 6, Page 69
“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.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Jay Gatsby), Chapter 6, Page 69
“Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small, reluctant hand. Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don’t think he had ever really believed in its existence before.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Jay Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 7, Page 73
“Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now – isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.” She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once – but I loved you too.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Daisy Buchanan to Jay Gatsby), Chapter 7, Page 82
“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, about Jay Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 7, Page 84
“I don’t think she ever loved him.” Gatsby turned around from a window and looked at me challengingly. “You must remember, old sport, she was very excited this afternoon. He told her those things in a way that frightened her – that made it look as if I was some kind of cheap sharper. And the result was she hardly knew what she was saying.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Daisy (Character: Jay Gatsby to Nick Carraway), Chapter 7, Page 84
“You ought to go away,” I said. “It’s pretty certain they’ll trace your car.”
“Go away NOW, old sport?”
“Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal.”
He wouldn’t consider it. He couldn’t possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn’t bear to shake him free.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby), Chapter 8, Page 91
“However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously—eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.
He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under false pretenses. I don’t mean that he had traded on his phantom millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself—that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact he had no such facilities—he had no comfortable family standing behind him and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 8, Page 92
“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, about Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 8, Page 94
“No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o’clock – until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. 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, about Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 8, Page 99
“Start him! I made him.”
“Oh.”
“I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right away he was a fine appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when he told me he was an Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to join up in the American Legion and he used to stand high there. Right off he did some work for a client of mine up to Albany. We were so thick like that in everything—” He held up two bulbous fingers “—always together.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Gatsby (Character: Nick Carraway and Meyer Wolfsheim), Chapter 8, Page 104
“I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace—or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons—rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, about Gatsby’s father (Character: 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, (Character: 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, about the American Dream, (Character: 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, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 110
What does Gatsby say about the past?
Jay Gatsby believes in the possibility of manipulating one’s past to create a different outcome for the future. In his quest to win back his former love, Daisy Buchanan, he declares, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!”
Gatsby’s perspective on the past thus reflects his conviction that despite temporal progression, past events aren’t static and can be reshaped to inform and change the future.
What is the quote where Gatsby lies about his past?
The quote where Gatsby appears to lie about his past is when he tells Nick Carraway: “I’ll tell you God’s truth. I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West — all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”
Moreover, Gatsby further tries to assert this impression by showing Nick his supposed award from Montenegro for valor, stating, “‘That’s the one from Montenegro.’ Major Jay Gatsby, I read, For Valour Extraordinary.”
How does Gatsby hide his past?
Gatsby hides his past through fabrication and misrepresentation of himself and his life. He was originally born poor under a different name and meticulously reconstructs himself in a new, affluent image.
Through frequent lies about his wealth origin, love life, and even reading habits, Gatsby created the illusion of being someone other than his true identity – James Gatz.
What does Gatsby say about the past in chapter 6?
“He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house—just as if it were five years ago. ”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Jay Gatsby), Chapter 6, Page 69
“You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Jay Gatsby), Chapter 6, Page 69
What does Gatsby say about his past in chapter 4?
“I’ll tell you God’s truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West — all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Jay Gatsby to Nick Carraway), Chapter 4, Page 42
Is Gatsby telling the truth about his past in chapter 4?
In the fourth chapter of The Great Gatsby, Gatsby’s recounting of his past to Nick Carraway is a mixture of truth and fabrication.
His war medal, declaring his acts of “Valour Extraordinary,” affirms his accounts of military service during World War I, providing some authenticity to his tales.
However, his faulty claim about San Francisco being located in the Middle West casts a shadow of doubt over his assertions of his upbringing, suggesting he isn’t entirely truthful about his past.
What page does Gatsby talk about repeating the past?
Gatsby talks about repeating the past on page 69, Chapter 6 of The Great Gatsby.