Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.

So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.

I hate dainty minds,' answered Marjorie. 'But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it.

then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses.

Men don't often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.

And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.

I've got an adjective that just fits you.

Clark, she said softly, I wouldn't change you for the world. You're sweet the way you are. The things that'll make you fail I'll love always-- the living in the past, the lazy days and nights you have, and all your carelessness and generosity.

There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.

I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty?one that everything afterward savors of anti?climax.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.

If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.

The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.

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.

Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.' He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something-an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.