F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
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When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.
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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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I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.
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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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They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically when they read ... Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream.
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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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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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Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.
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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.
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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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A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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...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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You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.
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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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She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of-“ I hesitated. “Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money-that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.
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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.