Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

I talk with the authority of failure.

Hae you got everything you need in the shape of-of tea?

Yet in the awful majesty of her pain he went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually. He wanted to gather her up in her arms, as he so often had Nicole, and cherish even her mistakes, so deeply were they part of her. The orange light through the drawn blind, the sarcophagus of her figure on the bed, the spot of face, the voice searching in the vacuity of her illness and finding only remote abstractions. As he arose the tears fled lava-like into her bandages.

She was a thin, a thin burning flame, colorless yet fresh. Her smile came first slowly, shy and bold, as if all the life of that little body had gathered for a moment around her mouth and the rest of her was a wisp that the least wind would blow away. She was a changeling whose lips were the only point of contact with reality.

A classic is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.

Tengo treinta años -dije-. He rebasado en cinco años la edad de mentirme a mí mismo y llamarle a eso honor.

he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality.

As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

she would never blame him for being the ineffectual idler so long as he did it sincerely, from the attitude that nothing much was worth doing

That was one manifestation of fear, the voice which whispered that he could not be both great and good, that genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves and twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to mediocrity.

The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves.

I did not think - I was a battleground for the thoughts of many men.

If truth is the end of life, happiness is the mode of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment.

He used to think that he wanted to be goos, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.

I like these streets... I always feel as though it's a performance being staged for me; as though the second I've passed they'll all stop leaping and laughing and, instead grow very sad, remembering how poor they are, and retreat with bowed heads into their houses. You often get that effect abroad

And for the first time in four months aroused his old version and horror towards all the business of life. The room had grown smothery. He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the corners of his mind.

But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love lingered – by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life.

I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration—even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!

She was appalled by West Egg's raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that eroded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

Téged is meglep? – Micsoda? – Hogy megint két ember vagyunk? Te nem szoktál erre gondolni? Hogy bárcsak egyek lennénk örökre, és aztán megint jön a csalódás, hogy mégiscsak kettÅ' az ember?

Just as Daisy's house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses, so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.

By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever.

he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling.

This was a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.