Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove

The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time-time, that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights.

it's so hard to find a male to gratify one's artistic taste

I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before — and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.

Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.

her real depths are Irish and romantic and illogical

It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together.

Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone—

They don't think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won't see that if they don't pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we're going round and round in a circle.

I've found my line- from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty- without this I am nothing.

I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's unwanted children. What a fate - to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers. ...Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings.

He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.

There were silences as murmurous as sound. There were pauses that seemed about to shatter and were only to be snatched back to oblivion by the tightening of his arms about her and the sense that she was resting there as a caught, gossamer feather, drifted in out of the dark.

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something- most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his platonic conception of himself.

I thought you weren't afraid. I never am --but I won't throw my life away just to show one man I'm not.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

Tangled with love in the moonlight she welcomed the anarchy of her lover.

I suppose all great happiness is a little sad.

A returned battalion of the National Guard paraded through the streets with open ranks for their dead and then stepped down out of romance forever and sold you things over the counters of local stores.

No one likes to see people in moods of despair they themselves have survived.

In fact to write (This Side of Paradise) took three months; to conceive it-- three minutes; to collect the data in it-- all my life.

There's no 'Safety First' in Art.