F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful And Damned Quotes
I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go
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.
There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.
Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.
It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.
Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.
They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.
I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.
The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.
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.
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.
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.
He found that the business of optimism was no mean task.
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.
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.
The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.
Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty.
Rather nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.
Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?" -
A man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.
their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.
Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten remoteness of the afternoon.
I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth...