I read The Great Gatsby the first time when I was in tenth grade English class. I fell completely in love with it. It was by far my most favorite book, and the most recent movie adaption (while not as good as the book) was good as well. Over time, I became less obsessed with the Fitzgerald novel, and it wasn't until recently that I fully read the novel again for the second time. Sure, I had read parts of it at different times, looked for specific quotes, and pointed out my favorite parts to my friends, but had never read the book all the way through. After rereading it, I came across all the quotes that I loved again, and immediately fell in love with the novel all over again. Here are a few of those favorite quotes from The Great Gatsby!

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

“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.”

“I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

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

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

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

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. 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.”

“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”

“All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.”

“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.”