Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cada vez que creas que tienes que criticar a alguien, me dijo, solo recuerda que no toda la gente de este mundo ha contado con las ventajas de que tú has gozado.

Its nothing,' said Horace quietly, 'but if you can think of any nicer way of a man killing himself than taking a risk for you, why that's the way I want to die.

I love New York on summer afternoons when every one's away. There's something very sensuous about it--overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.

The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the treas and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.

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.

I read somewhere that the sun's getting hotter every year, said Tom genially. It seems that pretty soon the earth's going to fall into the sun--or wait a minute--it's just the opposite--the sun's getting colder every year. 1925

he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved. So it had been. So it would ever be…

But I hate to get anywhere by working for it. I'll show the marks, don't you know.

My God, she's good-looking! said Mr. Sandwood, who was just over thirty. Good-looking! cried Mr. Hedrick contemptuously, she always looks as if she wanted to be kissed! Turning those big cow-eyes on every calf in town! It was doubtful if Mr. Hedrick intended a reference to the maternal instinct.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

You said a bad driver is 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 make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.

He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn't realize just how extraordinary a 'nice' girl could be.

He wondered idly whether she was a poor conversationalist because she got no attention or got no attention because she was a poor conversationalist.

Life opened up in one if its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: 'Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.' On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.

I think one thing today and another tomorrow. That is really all that's the matter with me, except a crazy defiance and a lack of proportion.

After marriage came elation, and then, gradually, the growth of weariness. Responsibility descended upon Merlin, the responsibility of making his thirty dollars a week and her twenty suffice to keep them respectably fat and to hide with decent garments the evidence that they were.

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type: begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want anyone to know or than we know ourselves.

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.

I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me was become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations — with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days.

Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.

there's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal-- a small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful of banana peels, flung them valiantly in the direction of the potomac.

that illusion of young romantic love to which women look forever forward and forever back.

Was everyone followed in the moonlight?

I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.