F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes - Page 2

I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality - he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

Grow up and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.

Let us learn how to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead' he suggested, 'After that my own rule is to let everything alone'.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside his bed in the hotel tolling frantically, and remembered that he had left word to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily, his clothes in a pile by his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast in silence, and then sauntered out to get some air. Amory's mind was working slowly, trying to assimilate what had happened and separate from the chaotic imagery that stacked his memory the bare shreds of truth. If the morning had been cold and gray he could have grasped the reins of the past in an instant, but it was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in May, when the air of Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine. How much or how little Sloane remembered Amory did not care to know; he apparently had none of the nervous tension that was gripping Amory and forcing his mind back and forth like a shrieking saw.

The important thing is that you should not argue with them [Communists]....Whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind, ‘Fascist,’ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Trotskyist,’ and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process.

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.

What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe - why, intelligence never built a steam-engine! Circumstances built a steam-engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.

I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.

One should ... be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Artistic temperament is like a king with vigor and unlimited opportunity. You shake the structure to pieces by playing with it.

He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement --discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual «There!» yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't change the past.""Can't change the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!

This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.It is somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.

Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that...

Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world....The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head.

My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis-- a moulding of the confusion of life into form.

I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain...

The tears coursed down her cheeks- not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets.

I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.

It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.

The attitude of the city on his action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city, but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial. He was completely indifferent to popular opinion.

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.

I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's unwanted children. What a fate - to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers. ...Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings.

Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter…Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.Walking alone…was it splendor, or what, we were bound with?Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground withTapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.

A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. ...He aspires to create new and original works. His way is alone. If he succumbs to ideologies, he turns into a mouthpiece. He must hang on to his identity for dear life. In the end he must rely on his own judgment. It’s the only way to survive as a writer and an artist.

Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it--later in life he almost completely slew it--but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys... unscrupulousness... the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil... a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty... a shifting sense of honor... an unholy selfishness... a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity... he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to "pass" as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world... with this background did Amory drift into adolescence.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Rather nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

Human sympathy has its limits.

It was a curious day, slashed abruptly with fleeting, familiar impressions.

Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?

And then, one fairy night, May became June.

We'll all be failures?""Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of - of ineffectual and sad, and - oh, how can I tell you?

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

C'mon, Amory. Your romance is overYou don't know how true you spoke. No idea. 'At's the whole trouble

He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful — then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.

You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.

Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes...

My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.

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 it's wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can't it'll be time to argue.

We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...It has no day.

What are you going to do? "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.