Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– 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.”

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

“Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”

“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.”

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”

“Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.”

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

“Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”

“Think how you love me,' she whispered. 'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.'You'll always be like this to me.'Oh no; but promise me you'll remember.' Her tears were falling. 'I'll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight.”

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of–” I hesitated.“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money–that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.”

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”

“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”

“Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.You always look so cool," she repeated.She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.”

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”

“You'll find another.' God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.”

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

“Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.”

“I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won't.”

“Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”

“People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”

“She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.”

“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.”

“Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.--The Sensible Thing”

“Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”

“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.”

“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

“It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.”

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”

“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”

“I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight”

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

“Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!”

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

“...and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires”

“I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.”

“So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.”

“A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.”

“You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.”

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him”

“There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.”

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”

“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.”

“All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.”

“You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”

“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

“I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.”

“I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”

“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

“She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.”

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

“I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.”

“It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.”

“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”

“There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.”

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go”

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”

“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”

“New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.”

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

“I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

“He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”

“Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.”

“I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”

“Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.”

“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”

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

“I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.”

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”

“There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…”

“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”

“Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”

“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”

“Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”

“It takes two to make an accident.”

“I'm a cynical idealist.”