F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
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His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed —that voice was a deathless song.
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She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.
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He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.
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One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.
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The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.
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I just couldn't make the grade as a hack-that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.
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The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he's succeeded, and the failure because he's failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father's good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father's mistakes.
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Learn young about hard work and manners - and you'll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.
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All that kept her from breaking was that it was not an image of strength that was leaving her; she would be just as strong without him.
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A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.
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Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.
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Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter... And the rain and over the fields a voice calling...
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So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.
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In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
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He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and cafe, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.
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How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his.
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Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power-at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.
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I have lived hard and ruined the essential innocence [sic] in myself that could make it that possible [sic], and the fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps but not renunciation.
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Long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.
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I might have enjoyed the company of a woman or two... Or three but that had never stopped me from loving you.
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It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
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A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.
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...their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.
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For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.