F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes - Page 3

He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis - these had been his ingredients when he entered St. Regis'. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay to conceal the "Amory plus Beatrice" from the ferreting eyes of a boarding school, so St. Regis' had very painfully drilled Beatrice out of him and begun to lay down new and more conventional planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis' and Amory were unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself changed. Those qualities for which he had suffered: his moodiness, his tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the "St. Regis' Tattler"; it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very vanities that had not long ago been contemptible weaknesses.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Her fine high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet and shining, the colour of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood -- she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
It's only when the settlement work has gone on for months that one realizes how bad things are. As our secretary said to me, your finger-nails never seem dirty until you wash your hands.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it's carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
He found that the business of optimism was no mean task.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it--later in life he almost completely slew it--but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys... unscrupulousness... the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil... a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty... a shifting sense of honor... an unholy selfishness... a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity... he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to "pass" as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world... with this background did Amory drift into adolescence.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur standing had very little value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably be her principal study for years to come. She had begun as he had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room conversation culled from a slightly older set. Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of blasé sophistication. She had lived in a larger city and had slightly an advantage in range. But she accepted his pose--it was one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair. He was aware that he was getting this particular favor now because she had been coached; he knew that he stood for merely the best game in sight, and that he would have to improve his opportunity before he lost his advantage. So they proceeded with an infinite guile that would have horrified her parents.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Character is plot, plot is character.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This is all. It's been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn't do - and wouldn't last.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. ...He aspires to create new and original works. His way is alone. If he succumbs to ideologies, he turns into a mouthpiece. He must hang on to his identity for dear life. In the end he must rely on his own judgment. It’s the only way to survive as a writer and an artist.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life--not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don't like this kiss-and-forget.''But I don't want to argue. I think it's wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can't it'll be time to argue.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wish I had done everything on earth with you
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
That most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man".
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The present was the thing--work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life
F. Scott Fitzgerald
After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I just think of people," she continued, "whether they seem right where they are and fit into a picture. I don't mind if they don't do anything. I don't see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when people do anything.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Under the glass porte-cochère of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became grey and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxicabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated a surrender with equanimity. Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him - like an actor kissed in a picture.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
We'll all be failures?""Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of - of ineffectual and sad, and - oh, how can I tell you?
F. Scott Fitzgerald
She didn't like it," he said immediately."Of course she did.""She didn't like it," he insisted. "She didn't have a good time."He was silent and I guessed at his unutterable depression."I feel far away from her," he said. "It's hard to make her understand.""You mean about the dance?""The dance?" He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. "Old sport, the dance is unimportant.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
no girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it's every girl for herself.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't change the past.''Can't change the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't change the past.""Can't change the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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 then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
...I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved - and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact - and rather deeply wise. More than that, what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Cather's: "We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - people didn't get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.
F. Scott Fitzgerald