Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

SHE: You're not sentimental? HE: No, I'm romantic—a sentimental person thinks things will last—a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't. Sentiment is emotional.

he wonders frequently whether he is not without honour 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 anyone else he knows.

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

What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacing back and forth, its disastrous retreats!

This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state 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 halfway between death and immortality.

To this husband of hers she made the last concession of married life, which is more complete, more irrevocable, than the first—she listened to him. She told herself that the years had brought her tolerance—actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed of moral courage.

Dear little Dot, life is so damned hard. [...] So damned hard, so damned hard, he repeated aimlessly; it just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.

Tenemos que aprender a demostrarle nuestra amistad a un hombre cuando está vivo y no después de muerto

It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the habit of reading in bed – it soothed him.

She seems hopeful and normally hungry for life — even rather romantic.

A delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free.

And then in a jiffy he was under the high ceiling of his great front room. This was entirely satisfactory. Here, after all, life began. Here he slept, breakfasted, read and entertained.

Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remarks the futility of themselves.

Gondold csak el, mennyire szeretsz most – suttogta Nicole. – Nem kérem, hogy mindig így szeress, csak azt akarom, hogy ezt sose felejtsd el. Valahol bennem mindig ott él majd az a személy, aki ma este vagyok.

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, (P. 1)

There was the union of his soul with Gloria's, whose radiant fire and freshness was the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made.

You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand. It

He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful – then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.

She is one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them. Two types of men seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. All others are hers by natural prerogative.

Every man is born a success, he makes himself a failure.

the very vanities that had not long ago been contemptible weaknesses

My head aches so, so excuse this walking there like an ordinary with a white cat will explain, I think. I can speak three languages, four with English, and am sure I could be useful interpreting if you arrange such thing in France I'm sure I could control everything with the belts all bound around everybody like it was Wednesday. It

They are glad to see each other now – their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.

Art isn't meaningless. - It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so. - In other words, Dick, you're playing before a grandstand peopled with ghosts. - Give a good show anyhow. - On the contrary, I'd feel, it being a meaningless world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless. Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live. Would you want everyone to accept that sophistic rot?