F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

Then she added in a sort of childish delight: 'We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!' She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss.'It's impossible to be both together,' said John grimly. 'People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two...

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men.

Whenever you feel like criticzing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven´t had the advantages that you've had.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, "a constant striving" (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it) only adds to this unhappiness in the end--that end that comes to our youth and hope.

Take off that darn fur coat!...Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows.

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

Communism...muat of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

Writers aren't exactly people they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.

She was appalled by West Egg’s raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that eroded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty.

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur standing had very little value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably be her principal study for years to come. She had begun as he had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room conversation culled from a slightly older set. Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of blasé sophistication. She had lived in a larger city and had slightly an advantage in range. But she accepted his pose--it was one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair. He was aware that he was getting this particular favor now because she had been coached; he knew that he stood for merely the best game in sight, and that he would have to improve his opportunity before he lost his advantage. So they proceeded with an infinite guile that would have horrified her parents.

If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.

Whether it's something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday I must start out with an emotion, one that's close to me and that I can understand.

Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

A man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.

I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations -- with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country -- contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness -- hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.

Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?" -

Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.

The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.

their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.

America is a willingness of the heart.

She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.

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.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

I mean the women who, without any of the prerogatives of youth and beauty, demand continual slavery from their men....They sit back complacently and watch their husbands slave for them; and, without furnishing any of the pleasantries of life for their husbands, they demand the sort of continual attention that a charming fiancée might get....They are harridans and shrews who continually nag and scold until the men are driven idiotic.

Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on - I've seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have been hung — glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.

Art invariably grows out of a period when, in general, the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval.

Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over.

It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.

A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life--not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.

Breathing dreams like air

The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.

If the bonus army conquered Washington the lawyer had a boat hidden in the Sacramento River, and he was going to row upstream for a few months and then come back “because they always needed lawyers after a revolution to straighten out all the legal side.

He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated a surrender with equanimity. Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him - like an actor kissed in a picture.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man , more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. 'How do you get to West Egg village?' he asked helplessly. I told him. Ans as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He has casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren't just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.

She walked rather quickly; she liked to be active, though at times she gave an impression of repose that was at once static and evocative. This was because she knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent, contributing just her share of urbane humor with a precision that approached meagreness. But at the moment when strangers tended to grow uncomfortable in the presence of this economy she would seize the topic and rush off with it, feverishly surprised with herself-- then bring it back and relinquish it abruptly, almost timidly, like an obedient retriever, having been adequate and something more.

It's always a delusion when I see what you don't want to see (Nicole to Dick).

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness.

She didn't like it," he said immediately."Of course she did.""She didn't like it," he insisted. "She didn't have a good time."He was silent and I guessed at his unutterable depression."I feel far away from her," he said. "It's hard to make her understand.""You mean about the dance?""The dance?" He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. "Old sport, the dance is unimportant.

Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.

The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.

Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.

The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath - and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light - light dividing like pearls - forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.

my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.

Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

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 stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.