Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

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?

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.

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.

If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.

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

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

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth...

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

That’s going to be your trouble — judgment about yourself.(Tender is the Night)

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

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.

Youve got an awfully kissable mouth.