The Great Gatsby

  • The Great Gatsby

  • Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

  • If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

  • Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

  • I must have you!”

  • — THOMAS PARKE D'INVILLIERS

  • Chapter 1

  • Nick Carraway

    In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

    Profile Picture of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby
  • Profile Picture of Father in The Great Gatsby

    Father

    “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,”

  • Nick Carraway

    he told me,

    Profile Picture of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby
  • Profile Picture of Father in The Great Gatsby

    Father

    “just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”

    lawtonsmith

  • Nick Carraway

    He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.

    Profile Picture of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby

  • In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

    Cody S.
    sb3ckthorpe

  • 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 wild, unknown men.

  • Nick Carraway

    Most of the confidences were unsought— frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—

    Profile Picture of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby

  • for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

    lawtonsmith

  • Nick Carraway

    Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

    Profile Picture of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby

  • 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.

  • 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.

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