...the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.
F. Scott FitzgeraldBaltimore is warm but pleasant... I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.
F. Scott FitzgeraldThe best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American.
F. Scott FitzgeraldI see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald