Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Think how you love me,' she whispered. 'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.' You'll always be like this to me.' Oh no; but promise me you'll remember.' Her tears were falling. 'I'll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight.

He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

It takes two to make an accident.

Actually that's my secret — I can't even talk about you to anybody because I don't want any more people to know how wonderful you are.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

Ah, she cried, you look so cool. Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. You always look so cool, she repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.

There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.

and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires

A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.

I'm a cynical idealist.

New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o'clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn't work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.