“I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to "succeed" — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future.”

—  F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)

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F. Scott Fitzgerald 411
American novelist and screenwriter 1896–1940

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