Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis-- a moulding of the confusion of life into form.

They proceeded with an infinite guile that would have horrified her parents.

And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.

this is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding—it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.

As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

It was wearisome to contemplate that animate protoplasm, reasonable by courtesy only, shut up in a car by an incomprehensible civilization, taken somewhere, to do a vague something without aim or significance or consequence.

That's my Middle West - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps, and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that...

Her beauty was cool as this damp breeze, as the moist softness of her own lips.

They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another

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—

They kiss—definitely and thoroughly.)

The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed in strange new ways...

Gloria has a very young soul-irresponsible, as much as anything else. She has no sense of responsibility. She's sparklin, Aunt Catherine, said Richard pleasantly. A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty.

My courage is faith—faith in the eternal resilience of me—that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide—not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often—and the female hell is deadlier than the male.

A mí me gustan las fiestas con mucha gente. Son muy íntimas. En las fiestas con poca gente la intimidad es nula.

One o' clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping sentences of an enraptured man. Four o'clock: her little feet moving to melody, her face distinct in the crowd, her partner happy as a petted puppy and mad as the immemorial hatter…

What is a gentleman, anyway? He's a man who prefers the first edition of a book to the last edition of a newspaper.

already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit.

The notion originated with Daisy's suggestion that we hire five bath-rooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as "a place to have a mint julep." Each of us said over and over that it was a "crazy idea."—we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny...

Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive.

Hay una cosa segura, más segura que ninguna: los ricos hacen dinero y los pobres hacen… niños

there was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of he young breath-giving air.