F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
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Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I.
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Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.
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I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.
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We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical ill-considered criticism.
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Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.
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He stretched his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. 'I know myself,' he cried, 'but that is all - '
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Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
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If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.
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Action is character.
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It is difficult for young people to live things down. We will tolerate vice, grand larceny and the quieter forms of murder in our contemporaries... but our children's friends must show a blank service record.
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Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--
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As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.
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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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You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
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Intelligence is measured by a person's ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.
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A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.
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Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.
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To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.
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Stahr's eyes and Kathleen's met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call.
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'Look here, old sport, ... what's your opinion of me, anyhow?' A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.
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I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
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I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.
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Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
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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.