F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
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Progress was a labyrinth ... people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it ... the invisible king-the élan vital-the principle of evolution ... writing a book, starting a war, founding a school.
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Girls like you are responsible for all the tiresome colorless marriages; all those ghastly inefficiencies that pass as feminine qualities. What a blow it must be when a man with imagination marries the beautiful bundle of clothes that he's been building ideals around, and finds that she's just a weak, whining, cowardly mass of affectations!
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Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.
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Life was a damned muddle - a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of - everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side.
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What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining." I’m glad Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.
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"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now - isn't that enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly. "I did love him once-but I loved you too."
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He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.
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Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.
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That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
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'The truth is that the public has done one of those startling and amazing things that they do about once in a hundred years. They’ve seized an idea.''What is it?''That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.'
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he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.
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The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it.
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The men--the undergraduates of Yale and Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better-looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country.
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The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaiety, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.
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I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.
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you once liked me, didn't you?, he asked. LIKED you- I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking.
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You know, you’re a little complicated after all.” “Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really - I’m just a - I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.
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You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.
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I've noticed that the children of other nations always seem precocious. That's because the strange manners of their elders have caught our attention most and the children echo those manners enough to seem like their parents.
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Every act of life, from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner, became an effort. I hated the night when I couldn't sleep and I hated the day because it went toward night.
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A writer like me must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothing-can-happen-to me, nothing-can-touch-me.... I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip.
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I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
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Love is fragile -- she was thinking -- but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love-words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.
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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.