F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
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Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.
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Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice. --The Sensible Thing
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You'll find another.' God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.
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The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.
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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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You have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without conscience, you are just one of many thousand journalists.
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I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.
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One thin's sure and nothing's surer The rich get richer and the poor get - children. In the meantime, In between time...
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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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Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence, but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity.
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Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
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One well-known critic has been pleased to like this extravaganza better than anything I have written. Personally I prefer 'The Offshore Pirate.' But, to tamper slightly with Lincoln: If you like this sort of thing, this, possibly, is the sort of thing you'll like.
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So there was not an "I" anymore - not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect - save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more.
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then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses.
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Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!
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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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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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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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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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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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I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.
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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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The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny.
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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.