Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

Uncle had only paid hundred a month for whole great big house in Minneapolis.

Man is vulnerable only in his pride, but delicate as Humpty-Dumpty once that is meddled with - though some of them paid the fact a cautious lipservice.

His day, usually a jellylike creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, towards a climax, as a play should, as a day should.

Oh-oh-oh-oh Other flamingos than me

He raised his right hand and with a papal cross he blessed the beach from the high terrace.

It seemed a tragedy to want nothing – and yet he wanted something, something. He knew in flashed what is was – some path of hope to lead him towards what he thought was an imminent and ominous old age.

He wanted a world that was like walking through rain

One doctor in Chicago said I was bluffing, but what he really meant was that I was a twin six and he had never seen one before.

Tell me. I'll believe it. I always believe anything anyone tells about myself – don't you?

Oh, the enormous conceit of the man!

He looked at the shoe-laces—Dick had tied them that morning. He had tied them—and now he was this heavy white mass. All that remained of the charm and personality of the Dick Humbird he had known—oh, it was all so horrible and unaristocratic and close to the earth. All tragedy has that strain of the grotesque and squalid—so useless, futile... the way animals die....

way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses

Anthony for the moment wanted fiercely to paint her, to set her down now, as she was, as with each relentless second she could never be again. 'What were you thinking?' she asked. 'Just that I'm not a realist,' he said, and then: 'No, only the romanticist preserves the things worth preserving.

New York, he supposed, was home—the city of luxury and mystery, of preposterous hopes and exotic dreams.

Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.

There was suddenly no question on his mind, no eternal problem for a solution and resolution. He had experienced an emotion that was neither mental nor physical, nor merely a mixture of the two, and the love of life absorbed him for the present to the exclusion of all else. He was content to let the experiment remain isolated and unique.

I just think of people," she continued, "whether they seem right where they are and fit into the picture. I don't mind if they don't do anything. I don't see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when anybody does anything." "You don't want to do anything?" "I want to sleep

She looked up at him as he took a step toward the door; she looked at him without the slightest idea as to what was in his head, she saw him take another step in slow motion, turn and look at her again, and she wanted for a moment to hold him and devour him, wanted his mouth, his ears, his coat collar, wanted to surround him and engulf him.

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual There!—yet

It's a bad town unless you're on top of it

Books mean more than people to me anyway.

After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here.

Not only for that night but for the days and weeks that followed his books were to be but furniture and his friends only people who lived and walked in a nebulous outer world from which he was trying to escape.

A classic, suggested Anthony, 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….