F. Scott Fitzgerald: Quotes about life (page 2)

“But I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”

“And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.”

“Life cracked like ice!”

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

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

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

“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…”

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

“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.”

“Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.”

“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.”

“sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy”

“all the time something within her was crying for a decision.
She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand”

“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.”

“This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the "Smart Set" in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a pattern — a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation.”

“To Anthony life was a struggle against death, that waited at every corner. It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the habit of reading in bed — it soothed him. He read until he was tired and often fell asleep with the lights still on.”

“There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth — yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams.”

“There is a sort of waking nightmare that sets in sometimes when one has missed a sleep or two, a feeling that comes with extreme fatigue and a new sun, that the quality of the life around has changed. It is a fully articulate conviction that somehow the existence one is then leading is a branch shoot of life and is related to life only as a moving picture or a mirror — that the people, and streets, and houses are only projections from a very dim and chaotic past.”