Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

You'd think you'd been singled out of all the women in the world for this crowning indignity. What if I do! she cried angrily. It isn't an indignity for them. It's their one excuse for living. It's the one thing they're good for. It is an indignity for me.

Life was a damned muddle . . . a football game with every one off-side and the referee gotten rid of—every one claiming the referee would have been on his side. . .

Why? But I want to know just why it's impossible for an American to be gracefully idle—his words gathered conviction—it astonishes me. It—it—I don't understand why people think that every young man ought to go down-town and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of his life at dull, unimaginative work, certainly not altruistic work.

there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race

It became established among his Harvard intimates that he was in Rome, and those of them who were abroad that year looked him up and discovered with him, on many moonlight excursions, much in the city that was older than the Renaissance or indeed than the republic. Maury Noble, from Philadelphia, for instance, remained two months, and together they realized the peculiar charm of Latin women and had a delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free. Not

for he was young now as he would never be again, and more triumphant than death.

It is astonishing how much worse one mosquito can be than a swarm. A swarm can be prepared against, but one mosquito takes on a personality—a hatefulness, a sinister quality of the struggle to the death.

We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives-experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded in just that way ever before.

Sometimes I don't know if Zelda isn't a character that I created myself.

No hay fuego ni frío que pueda desafiar a lo que un hombre guarda entre los fantasmas de su corazón.

We'll all be failures? Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of - of ineffectual and sad, and - oh, how can I tell you?

And of course all that he is is a gifted man without a moral sense.

A girl who could send tear-stained telegrams.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. - Nick Carraway

I broke a date for him. To-day I feel I'd break anything for him, including the ten commandments and my neck.

But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.

This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part. It is somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.

The college dreamed on-- awake. He felt a nervous excitement that might have been the very throb of its slow heart. It was a stream where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be vanishing almost as it left his hand. As yet he had nothing, he had taken nothing.

No podíamos vernos, sin embargo, nos hemos estado queriendo todo el tiempo.

Two out of every three professional officers considered that wars were made for armies and not armies for wars.

Acho que todo mundo na América, exceto umas mil pessoas escolhidas, deveria ser obrigado a aceitar um código moral super-rígido: o catolicismo romano, por exemplo. Não me queixo da moralidade convencional. Pelo contrário, reclamo dos heréticos medíocres que roubam os frutos da sofisticação e adotam uma pose de liberalidade moral a que suas inteligências não fazem jus.

Oh, it isn't that I mind the glittering caste system, admitted Amory. I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I've got to be one of them.

Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hand on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.

Old Marcus still managed to function with disquieting resilience. Some never-atrophying instinct warned hi of danger, of gangings up against him--he was never so dangerous himself as when others considered him surrounded. His grey face had attained such immobility that even those who were accustomed to watch the reflex of the inner corner of his eye could no longer see it. Nature had grown a little white whisker there to conceal it; his armor was complete.