F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
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The ability to hold two competing thoughts in one's mind and still be able to function is the mark of a superior mind
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In the morning you were never violently sorry-- you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.
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Talk English to me, Tommy. Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole. But the meanings are different-- in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too. That gives me an advantage.
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Men she knew'? - she had conceded vaguely to herself that all men who had ever been in love with her were her friends.
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The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.
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Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow.
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At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others -- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner -- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
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Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen.
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It isn't given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.
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Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.
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He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.
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we both fitted. If our corners were not rubbed off they were at least pulled in. But deep in us both was something that made us require more for happiness. I didn't know what I wanted
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People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man's duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness.
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I hate dainty minds,' answered Marjorie. 'But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it.
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There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.
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Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!
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Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow.
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That's the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.
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For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.
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No," interrupted Marcia emphatically. "And you're a sweet boy. Come here and kiss me." Horace stopped quickly in front of her. "Why do you want me to kiss you?" he asked intently. "Do you just go round kissing people?" "Why, yes," admitted Marcia, unruffled. "'At's all life is. Just going around kissing people.
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I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.
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but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game
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he was figuratively following along beside her as she walked the fence, ready to catch her if she should fall.
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He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real.