F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quotes

• “Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything ...”
• “I don't think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping...”
• “Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; de...”
• “I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems ...”
• “As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stare...”
• “The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the su...”
• “The present was the thing--work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a fathe...”
• “Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between ...”
• “There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, w...”
• “My courage is faith--faith in the eternal resilience of me--that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel ...”
• “This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in ...”
• “Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made ef...”
• “The grass is full of ghosts tonight.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.' They paused by Little and watched the moon ...”
• “Deep in his heart, he wondered if he was after all worse than this man or the next. He knew that he could sophisticate h...”
• “One o’ clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in...”
• “The movies remind me of the Triangle Club at Princeton. I used to belong to it, and we always started out firm in our de...”
• “Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I th...”
• “In the morning you were never violently sorry-- you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was s...”
• “The important thing is that you should not argue with them [Communists]....Whatever you say, they have ways of twisting ...”
• “Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I beli...”
• “The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light ...”
• “Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret ...”
• “We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the un...”
• “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightene...”
• “Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality - he loathed knowing that to-morrow a...”
• “Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs a...”
• “The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent perso...”
• “If the bonus army conquered Washington the lawyer had a boat hidden in the Sacramento River, and he was going to row ups...”
• “A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards ...”
• “She was appalled by West Egg’s raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that eroded...”
• “Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effo...”
• “I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude towar...”
• “Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort ...”
• “After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a n...”
• “I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there w...”
• “The attitude of the city on his action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city, but beca...”
• “I just think of people," she continued, "whether they seem right where they are and fit into a picture. I don't mind if ...”
• “Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift ...”
• “Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the str...”
• “Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word ...”
• “All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider an...”
• “I am glad you are happy--but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you s...”
• “Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in ...”
• “The tears coursed down her cheeks- not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashe...”
• “He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated a surrender with equanimity. Yet she knew she...”
• “If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don't like this kiss-and-forget.''But I don't want to argue. I think i...”
• “Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat...”
• “All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions...”
• “That's the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't car...”
• “Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more ...”