Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

I can't tell you just how wonderful she is. I don't want anyone to know.

there'll be a great running up and down upon the earth for a

The feel of her head against his shoulder, of her familiar body, sent a shock of emotion over him. His arms holding her had a tendency to tighten around her.

You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn't to drive at all." "I am careful." "No, you're not." "Well, other people are," she said lightly. "What's that got to do with it?" "They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an accident.

best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.

All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else's clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.

En el crepúsculo encantado de la metrópolis a veces sentía una fascinante soledad, y la sentía en otros: pobres y jóvenes oficinistas que rondaban los escaparates hasta que llegaba la hora de su solitaria cena en un restaurante; jóvenes oficinistas al anochecer, desperdiciando los momentos más intensos de la noche y de la vida.

The start and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering death of the last starts and the premature birth of the first newsboys. The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal.

Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass.

He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced- or it seemed to face-the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.

But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

But it seemed to him that there should be a difference in his attitude. All the distress that he had ever known, the sorrow and the pain, had been because of women. It was something that in different ways they did to him, unconsciously, almost casually—perhaps finding him tender-minded and afraid, they killed the things in him that menaced their absolute sway.

At first this quality of hers somehow irritated Amory. He considered his own uniqueness sufficient, and it rather embarrassed him when she tried to read new interests into him for the benefit of what other adorers were present. He felt as if a polite but insistent stage manager were attempting to make him give a new interpretation of a part he had conned for years.

Non riuscivo a perdonarlo e neanche trovarlo simpatico, ma capii che dal suo punto di vista ciò che aveva fatto era pienamente giustificato. Era stato tutto molto sbadato e pasticciato. Erano gente sbadata, Tom e Daisy: sfracellavano cose e persone e poi si ritiravano nel loro denaro o nella loro ampia sbadataggine o in ciò che comunque li teneva uniti, e lasciavano che altri mettessero a posto il pasticcio che avevano fatto.

Doctor Dougall was wrong. It was tempermentally impossible for Amory to get the best marks in school.

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed—the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

Even forty years ago we had good men in politics, but we, we are brought up to pile up a million and show what we are made of. Sometimes I wish I'd been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy.

So many, such mingled emotions, that no one of them was separable from the others! She could have wept for her mother, who was crying quietly back there ten feet and for the loveliness of the June sunlight flooding in at the windows. She was beyond all conscious perceptions. Only a sense, colored with delirious wild excitement, that the ultimately important was happening - and a trust, fierce and passionate, burning in her like a prayer, that in a moment she would be forever and securely safe.

I'm romantic—a sentimental person thinks things will last—a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't. Sentiment is emotional.

But after dark all that is most satisfactory in French life swims back into the picture—the sprightly tarts, the men arguing with a hundred Voilàs in the cafés, the couples drifting, head to head, toward the satisfactory inexpensiveness of nowhere.

Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary's cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret wamrth within.

however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.

What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances... Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of circumstances.

Back out,' he suggested after a moment. 'Put her in reverse.' 'But the WHEEL'S off!' He hesitated. 'No harm in trying,' he said.