F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
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!
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.
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.
no girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it's every girl for herself.
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?
If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.
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.
That most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man".
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.
You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.
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.
Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.
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.
A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.
He was good looking, "sort of distinguished when he wants to be", had a line, and was properly inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environment led her to desire
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.
Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness.
This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.
Rather nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.
Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?" -
My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis-- a moulding of the confusion of life into form.
Whether it's something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday I must start out with an emotion, one that's close to me and that I can understand.
one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.
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.
You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.
C'mon, Amory. Your romance is overYou don't know how true you spoke. No idea. 'At's the whole trouble
She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.
Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.
Writers aren't exactly people, they're a bunch of people trying to be one person.
...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
This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.It is somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.
Whenever you feel like criticzing any one, " he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven´t had the advantages that you've had.
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.
There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness.
Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.
I became bored - that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts.
Isn’t Hollywood a dump — in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.
I don't ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.
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.
No grand idea was ever born in a conference but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.