Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your personality, as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.

I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the impossible, come true.

Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world's weight he had never chosen to bear.

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 - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... And one fine morning ---

People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.

Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I won't kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can't get rid of habits.

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... 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.

She's got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It's full of–" I hesitated. "Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly. That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money–that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it.

Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice. --The Sensible Thing

It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

Strange children should smile at each other and say, Let's play.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.

She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.