Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I dont want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

I wish I had done everything on earth with you

If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I dont like this kiss-and-forget.But I dont want to argue. I think its wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we cant itll be time to argue.

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.

Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.

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.

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

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.

The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.

This is all. Its been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldnt do - and wouldnt last.

Character is plot, plot is character.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

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.

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.

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.

He found that the business of optimism was no mean task.

But an inferior talent can only be graceful when its carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.

Its only when the settlement work has gone on for months that one realizes how bad things are. As our secretary said to me, your finger-nails never seem dirty until you wash your hands.