F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
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They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression-- yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarecly tolerated guest at a party she was giving.
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he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.
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Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.
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It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
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What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
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You're a historian. Tell me if there are any bath-tubs in history. I think they've been frightfully neglected.
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To Anthony life was a struggle against death, that waited at every corner. It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the habit of reading in bed - it soothed him. He read until he was tired and often fell asleep with the lights still on.
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There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.
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You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.
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The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.
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The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
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Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.
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Of this story I can say that it came to me in an irresistible form, crying to be written. It will be accused perhaps of being a mere piece of sentimentality, but, as I saw it, it was a great deal more. If, therefore, it lacks the ring of sincerity, or even, of tragedy, the fault rests not with the theme but with my handling of it.
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But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down.
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When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.
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Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief-that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another:
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Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... And one fine morning ---
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one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty−one that everything afterward savors of anti−climax.
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You’re just the romantic age,” she continued- “fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is- oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.” - Hildegarde
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Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
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Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.
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You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you
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And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.
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Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.