Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts. But, with a mistaken faith in intelligence, I plodded on.

U mojim mla?im i tanko?udnim godinama otac mi je dao savjet na koji se u mislima ?esto vra?am. -Kad god osjetiš želju da nekoga osudiš - kazao mi je - sjeti se samo toga da nisu svi ljudi na svijetu imali onih prednosti koje si ti imao.

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.

I did not think- I was a battleground for the thoughts of many men; rather was I one of those desirable but impotent countries over which the great powers surge back and forth.

She was sorry, and rather revolted at his dirty hands, but she laughed in a well-bred way, as though it were nothing unusual to her to watch a man walking in a slow dream.

naked souls are poor things ever

I'm not sure what I'll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.

This isn't just an epigram – life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

What little I've accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back - but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: 'I've found my line - from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty - without this I am nothing.

He differed from the healthy type that was essentially middle class—he never seemed to perspire. Some people couldn't be familiar with a chauffeur without having it returned;

and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.

But all I know – the tremendous importance of myself to me, and the necessity of acknowledging that importance to myself – these things the wise and lovely Gloria was born knowing, these things and the painful futility of trying to know anything else.

That's quite different. I told you I wouldn't want to tie my life to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made any sweepin' generalities.

Whatever worth while comes to you, won't be through the channels you were searching last year.

A la vida se la observa mejor desde una sola ventana.

She yawned gracefully in my face.

Very rarely, with the spur of jealousy or forced separation, the ancient ecstasies returned, the apparent communion of soul and soul, the emotion excitement.

They awoke, nauseated and tired, dispirited with life, capable only of one pervasive emotion – fear.

they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. (201)

I like these streets,' observed Anthony aloud. '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, but seldom in this country.

After the sureties of youth there sets in a period of intense and intolerable complexity.

Beside her the two dozen schoolgirls and debutantes, young married women and waifs and strays whom he had known were so many females, in the word's most contemptuous sense, breeders and bearers, exuding still that faintly odorous atmosphere of the cave and the nursery.

The values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future – so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic.