F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

I've got an adjective that just fits you.

No," interrupted Marcia emphatically. "And you're a sweet boy. Come here and kiss me." Horace stopped quickly in front of her. "Why do you want me to kiss you?" he asked intently. "Do you just go round kissing people?" "Why, yes," admitted Marcia, unruffled. "'At's all life is. Just going around kissing people.

Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.

When Eleanor's arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her-- she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes.

All I think of ever is that I love you.

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

She was beautiful - but especially she was without mercy.

That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.

Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush-these alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth-bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love's exaltation.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.

Beauty 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-

A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.

Almost everybody can be imagined as either a cat or a dog.

I want to be a society vampire, you see.

but they were frightened at his survivant will, once a will to live, now become a will to die.

I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.

It's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

Englishmen must have an island.

The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes.

It isn't given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.

The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the unclear voices of children, already gathered like crikets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight.

So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.

Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power-at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.

You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.

A squalid phantasmagoria of breath

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.

Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain.

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.

One girl can be pretty - but a dozen are only a chorus.

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

Men she knew'? - she had conceded vaguely to herself that all men who had ever been in love with her were her friends.

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.

I'm inclined to reserve all judgement, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

I see you're looking at my cuff buttons." I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now.

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.

So there was not an "I" anymore - not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect - save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more.

Then she added in a sort of childish delight: 'We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!' She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss. 'It's impossible to be both together,' said John grimly. 'People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two.

To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless ratiocination of subject - of endless trying to dig out the essential truth, the essential justice. As a first premise you have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without the conscience, you are just one of many thousands of journalists.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.