F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

page 6

“The fire blazing in her dark and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame.”

“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 children's eyes.”

“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They are not like aches or wounds; they are more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there is not enough material.”

“He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.”

“Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”

“My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”

“The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.”

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

“She was incurably dishonest.”

“They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale---and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.”

“Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.”

“But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.”

“I don't like girls in the daytime,' he said shortly, and then thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: 'But I like you.' He cleared his throat. 'I like you first and second and third.”

“I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”

“the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.”

“He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.”

“Kiss me now, love me now.”

“I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”

“I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't repeat the past."

"Can't repeat the past? he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!”

“What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?”

“THE VOICE: (to BEAUTY) Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.”

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead," he suggested. "After that my own rule is to let everything alone.”

“He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.”

“You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.”

“Never miss a party… good for the nerves--like celery.”

“The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.”

“Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.”

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

“Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.”

“Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay”

“Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning.”

“Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.”

“I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.”

“Don't say 'wife.' I'm your mistress. Wife's such an ugly word. Your 'permanent mistress' is so much more tangible and desirable….”

“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....”

“Who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the darkness?”

“To create souls in men, to create fine happiness and fine despair she must remain deeply proud - proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, to be passionate and possessed.”

“It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.”

“I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.”

“Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains…”

“It happens that I want you, and so I just haven’t room for any other desires.”

“She wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe forever.”

“These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire—I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.”

“and will I like being called a jazz baby? --You will love it.”

“When I'm with you, I don't breathe quite right.”

“We all must try to be good.”

“People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.”

“Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure.”

“It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.”