Morality In The Great Gatsby Quotes

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

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.

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. 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.

young people no longer “believe in the old standards and authorities, and they’re not intelligent enough, many of them, to put a code of morals and conduct in place of the sanctions that have been destroyed for them.

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. 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

Her mind kept drifting to the time she read The Great Gatsby. She didn't understand the social elite then and she doesn't understand them now. They are unpredictable with no moral compass. Money is everything to them yet even Gatsby with all his wealth couldn't win over his prize possession, Daisy. No matter what he had or did, he never fit in the North Shore circle. She couldn't pinpoint what made them tick.