Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.' 'How pleasant then to be insane!

Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafés in Mont Marte, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure.

You've got an awfully kissable mouth.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.

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.

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.

You're just the romantic age," she continued- "fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is- oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty." - Hildegarde

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.

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.

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over.

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

He's sensitive and I don't want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn't care about him.

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.

We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.

Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.

The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

I can't exactly describe how I feel but it's not quite right. And it leaves me cold.

You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to makes such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person I thought it was your secret pride. I'm thirty, I said. I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor. She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

It's just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they're never coming again, and I'm not really getting all I could out of them.

the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.