Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain...

We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.

I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - people didnt get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.

They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.

There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.

The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

...I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved - and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact - and rather deeply wise. More than that, what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Cathers: We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I wouldnt ask too much of her, I ventured. You cant change the past.Cant change the past? he cried incredulously. Why of course you can!

I wouldnt ask too much of her, I ventured. You cant change the past.Cant change the past? he cried incredulously. Why of course you can!

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.