F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

page 5

“You've got an awfully kissable mouth.”

“Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”

“The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.”

“The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.”

“At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p. m.”

“one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty−one that everything afterward savors of anti−climax.”

“I can’t exactly describe how I feel but it’s not quite right. And it leaves me cold.”

“If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.”

“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”

“Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”

“Life cracked like ice!”

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

“Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.”

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”

“Amory: I love you.
Rosalind: I love you- now.”

“Art isn't meaningless… It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.”

“my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.”

“Character is plot, plot is character.”

“I'm not much like myself any more.”

“I'm 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.”

“I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.”

“It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future”

“I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”

“A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

“A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.”

“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.”

“They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made….”

“All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don't come back.”

“I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.”

“Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I…”

“Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.”

“I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.”

“I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.”

“This is all. It's been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn't do - and wouldn't last.”

“Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.”

“She knew few words and believed in none.”

“She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.”

“No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”

“But you can love more than just one person, can't you?”

“It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”

“that voice was a deathless song.”

“He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.”

“If you're in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.”

“You are mine-you know you're mine!" he cried wildly… the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened… the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.”

“Action is Character.”

“Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.”

“What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining."
I’m glad Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.”

“When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her.”

“When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it.”