F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
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In a few days I'll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod-always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults-rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.
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She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.
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I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.
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Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
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The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.
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Want any of this stuff? Jordan?... Nick?" I didn't answer. Nick?" he asked again. What?" Want any?" No... I just remembered that today's my birthday." I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.
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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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Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
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I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
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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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Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
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Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.
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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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So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
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Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.
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Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
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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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He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.
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And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he has passed....
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It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.
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Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. You always look so cool," she repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.
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Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.
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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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In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.