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A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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He read at wine, he read in bed, He read aloud, had he the breath, His every thought was with the dead, And so he read himself to death.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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I want to tell you about your heart— you've probably been neglecting your heart—and you don’t know.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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One hurries through, even though there's time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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You are mine-you know you're mine!" he cried wildly...the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened...the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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...I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life - it can be a superabundance of interest.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to 'succeed' - and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding-- it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and roared-really all the banalities about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Her beautiful eyes and lips were very grave as she made her choice, and Anthony thought again how naive was her every gesture; she took all the things of life for hers to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Egyptian Proverb: The worst things: To be in bed and sleep not, To want for one who comes not, To try to please and please not.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...It has no day.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
