The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott FitzgeraldBeauty 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-
F. Scott FitzgeraldLet's borrow life preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.
F. Scott FitzgeraldI found something! Courage--just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always.
F. Scott FitzgeraldMarriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can't, shan't be the setting - it's going to be the performance, the lively, lovely, glamorous performance, and the world shall be the scenery.
F. Scott FitzgeraldHis youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.
F. Scott Fitzgerald