Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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...

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

Ive always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.

Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.

Deep in his heart, he wondered if he was after all worse than this man or the next. He knew that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the result of circumstances and environment; that often when he raged at himself as an egotist something would whisper ingratiatingly: No. Genius!

Writers arent exactly people, theyre a bunch of people trying to be one person.

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

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. Its the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over...We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they cant. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. Its worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the papers ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them-

All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone elses clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.

When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm

Thats the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you dont care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of childrens eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea--if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.

...and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires

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.

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 youve had.

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.

Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.

She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.

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.

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...