F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
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New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn East and North toward them - this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air.
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In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.
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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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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.
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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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I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.
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Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.
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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.
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Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
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At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.
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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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i'm in a muddle about a lot of things -- i've just discovered that i've a mind, and i'm starting to read" "read what?" "everything. i have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly things that make me think.
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I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.
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Baltimore is warm but pleasant... I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.
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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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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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Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a position in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather romantic figure, a scholar, a recluse, a tower of erudition. This amused him but secretly pleased him - he began going out, at first a little and then a great deal.
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You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.
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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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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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It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.
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The bottle of whiskey - the second one - was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who 'felt just as good on nothing at all.
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It was strange to have no self-to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.
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There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.