Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

Each life unfulfilled, you see,       It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;     We have not sighed deep, laughed free,       Starved, feasted, despaired—been happy. But his life

Unlike lovers they possessed no past; unlike man and wife, they possessed no future; yet up to in this morning Nicole had liked Abe better than anyone except Dick--and he had been heavy, belly-frightened, with love for her for years.

He saw Kathleen sitting in the middle of a long white table alone.Immediately things changed. As he walked toward her the people shrank back against the walls till they were only murals; the white table lengthened and became an altar where the priestess sat alone. Vitality welled up in him and he could have stood a long time across the table from her, looking and smiling.

At both ends of life man needed nourishment: a breast - a shrine. Something to lay himself beside when no one wanted him further, and shoot a bullet into his head.

Biography is the falsest of the arts.

Afterwards, he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.

You like to help everybody, don't you? I only pretend to.

She was entertained only by the gratification of her desires and by the direct exercise of her own charm.

Oh, such a shame, such a shame. Oh, such a shame. What's it all about anyhow?" "I've wondered for a long time." "But why bring it to me?" "I guess I'm the Black Death," he said slowly. "I don't seem to bring people happiness any more.

She had achieved the elusiveness that gives hidden significance to the least significant remarks. "Is it like you felt toward me in Paris?" "I feel comfortable and happy when I'm with you. In Paris it was different. But you never know how you once felt. Do you?

Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it.

Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.

He had long been outside of the world of simple desires and their fulfillments, and he was inept and uncertain.

It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.

Writers aren't exactly people. They're a whole lot of people, trying to be one person.

You seem to be bankrupt - morally as well as financially

It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people- with the single mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

The grass is full of ghosts tonight.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.' They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees. 'You know,' whispered Tom, 'what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years.

Do you believe in bobbed hair? asked G. Reece in the same undertone. I think it's unmoral, affirmed Bernice gravely. But, of course, you've either got to amuse people or feed'em or shock'em.

Benjamin started; an almost chemical change seemed to dissolve and recompose the very elements of his body. A rigour passed over him, blood rose into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a steady thumping in his ears. It was first love.

The war spirit's getting into me again. I have a hundred years of Ohio love behind me and I'm going to bomb out this trench.

An idea ran backward and forward in his head like a blind man, knocking over the solid furniture.

the heterogeneous indistinguishable mass of college boys, interested only in love at first sight,...

There's only one lesson to be learned from life anyway.... That there's no lesson to be learned from life.