Daisy Buchanan expresses her vanity in the words she says. For example, she once said, "I've been everywhere and seen everything and love everything," implying that she has been around the globe and seen everything there is to offer. She thinks that she can solve the problems of the world because she has gone to a few more places than other people have and that she knows more than other people do. Her wealth has given her the opportunity to visit extraordinary places, but it has also given her boredom. She has taken her money for granted and now she has too much free time.
Money has given the Buchanans and Miss Baker everything they had ever wanted. It has enriched their lives and their lifestyles. But it has also made their altitude towards others vain. Their wealth has revealed their vanity for the rest of the world to see.
The writers of universal histories and the history of culture are like people who, recognising the defects of paper money, decide to substitute for it coin of some metal inferior to gold. Their money will be 'hard coin', no doubt; but while paper money may deceive, the ignorant coin of inferior metal will deceive no-one. Just as gold is gold only where it is employable not merely for barter but also for the real use of gold, so too the universal historians will only rank as gold when they are able to answer the cardinal question of history: What constitutes power? The universal historians give contradictory replies to this question, while the historians of culture thrust it aside altogether and answer something quite different. And as imitation gold counters can only be used among a community of persons who agree to accept them for gold or who are ignorant of the nature of gold, so the universal historians and historians of culture who fail to answer the essential questions of humanity only serve as currency for sundry purposes of their own - in the universities and among the legions who go in for 'serious' reading, as they are pleased to call it."
"Though he was the most absent minded and forgetful of men, with the aid of a list his wife drew up he had bought everything, not forgetting his mother - and brother-in-law's commissions, nor the presents of a dress for Mademoiselle Byelov and toys for his nephews. In the early days of marriage it had seemed strange to him that his wife should expect him to remember all the items he had undertaken to buy, and he had been taken aback by her serious annoyance when he returned after his first absence, having forgotten everything. But in time he had grown used to this. Knowing that Natasha never asked him to get anything thing for herself, and only gave him commissions for others when he himself volunteered, he now found an unforeseen and childlike pleasure in this purchase of presents for the whole household and never forgot anything. If he incurred Natasha's censure now, it was only for buying and spending too much. To her other defects (as most people thought them but which to Pierre were virtues) of untidiness and neglect of herself Natasha certainly added that of thriftiness.