Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Im 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.

My courage is faith--faith in the eternal resilience of me--that joyll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does Ive got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide--not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, Ive been through hell without a whine quite often--and the female hell is deadlier than the male.

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

Then he kissed her. At his lips touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.

Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair? -

The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.

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.

My own rule is to let everything alone.

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.

All I think of ever is that I love you.

One o’ clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping sentences of an enraptured man. Four o’clock: her little feet moving to melody, her face distinct in the crowd, her partner happy as a petted puppy and mad as the immemorial hatter…

She was one of those people who are famous beyond their actual achievement.

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.

The movies remind me of the Triangle Club at Princeton. I used to belong to it, and we always started out firm in our decision to create new and startling things. We always ended up by producing the same old show. In the beginning, our enthusiasm and ideals discarded as rubbish all the old fossilized plots.

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

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.

The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the days last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

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

one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.