F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
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Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
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That was always my experience-a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton .... However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.
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Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.
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For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
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They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.
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People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.
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I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!
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It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.
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Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.
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Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
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The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire's bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle.
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His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.
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No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
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I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
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Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
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First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
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She saw him the first day on board, and then her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.
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There are no second acts in American lives.
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How strange to have failed as a social creature - even criminals do not fail that way - they are the law's 'Loyal Opposition,' so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.
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She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.
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Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
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Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
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To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.
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They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.