Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

Gloria was sure she wanted but to read and dream and be fed tomato sandwiches and lemonades by some angelic servant

Her voice is full of money,... That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money- that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it....High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl....

but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game

Rich girls don't marry poor boys, Jay Gatsby

A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths.

The tears coursed down her cheeks - not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair and went off into a deep vinous sleep.

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 stare blankly.

Then he put in a call for Nicole in Zurich, remembering so many things as he waited, and wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be.

Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.

With people like us our home is where we are not.

They damned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them 'clever.

What are you going to do? Can't say - run for president, write - Greenwich Village? Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made. But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.

Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions.

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, before any words came through.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.

Tom, I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.

The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...

His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was

Just as he still cared more for her than for any other creature, so did he more intensely and frequently hate her.

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

And Yale is November, crisp and energetic.