Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

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.

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

Understand now, Im purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish.

There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.

Heres to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

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

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.

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

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

We cant possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the names become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. Its a sad season of life without growth...It has no day.

And then, one fairy night, May became June.

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.

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandoras box.Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York.

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.

Im glad its a girl. And I hope shell be a fool--thats the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.