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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I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
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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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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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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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He doesn't believe that public swimming-pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the world; moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it.
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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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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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Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
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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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In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.
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Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
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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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What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
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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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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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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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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 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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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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Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
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Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
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The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
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The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.