An English teacher runs through some of the key quotations from Chapter 8 of The Great Gatsby and explains them.
Please bear in mind, this is not an exhaustive list of quotations and the more independent you can be the better. You will need to have read and understood Chapter 8 before watching this video - it's not meant as a summary - it's a list of quotations that would be good to use in coursework.
I've included the quotations below in case you need them:
Chapter 8
‘He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn’t bear to shake him free.’ (149)
‘told it to me because ‘Jay Gatsby’ had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice’ (149)
‘It had excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy – it increased her value in his eyes.’ (149)
‘he was at present a penniless young man … 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.’ (150)
‘he let her believe that he was from much the same strata as herself – that he was fully able to take care of her.’ (150)
‘Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.’ (151)
‘He stretched 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.’ (154)
‘‘They’re a rotten crowd,’ I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the damn bunch put together.’ … 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 the fact all the time.’ (155)
‘He announced that he had a way of finding out who that car belonged to, and then he blurted out that a couple of months ago his wife had come from the city with her face bruised and her nose swollen.’(158)
‘I spoke to her,’ he muttered, after a long silence. ‘I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. … Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’ (161)
‘A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding towards him through the amorphous trees.’ (163)
The music is courtesy of Gunnar Olsen and is titled Shoulder Closures.
