Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't repeat the past." "Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!

Laughter is easier, minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.

They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.

I love you. Do you hear? I'm telling you all of a sudden, but it isn't new with me. I love you.

gray, scrawny Italian child

Oh, many things. I've led a very active life. Knocked about here and there. (His tone implies anything front lion-stalking to organized crime.)

For the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment

some of the boys she went with in Baltimore were terrible speeds and came to dances in states of artificial stimulation;

He felt so intensely about people that in moments of apathy he preferred to remain concealed; that one could parade a casualness into his presence was a challenge to the key on which he lived

Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. Already

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood--she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house - the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares.

The thing to do is to forget about the heat,' said Tom impatiently. 'You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.

Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.

There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.

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

What was in the bags?" she asked softly. "Florida mud," he answered. That was one of two true things I told you.

It's like lifting off in an airplane: you're on the ground, on the ground, on the ground... and then you're up, riding on a magical cushion of air and prince of all you survey. That makes me happy, because it's what I was made to do.

Pas une seconde il n'avait cessé de regarder Daisy et je pense que les objets qu'il possédait changeait de valeur à ses yeux à mesure qu'ils en prenaient une aux yeux de celle qu'il aimait. Il les contemplait parfois avec stupéfaction, comme si l'incroyable et indiscutable présence de Daisy les rendait brusquement irréels.

Dick's discovery that he was not in love with her, nor she with him, had added to rather than diminished his passion for her. Now that he knew he would not enter further into her life, she became the strange woman for him. He supposed many men meant no more than that when they said they were in love - not a wild submergence of soul, a dipping of all colors into an obscuring dye, such as his love for Nicole had been.

The idea of a slow approach to the luxury of leisure drove him wild. He was, of course, progressing toward it, but, like a child eating his ice cream so slowly that he couldn't taste it at all.

It was a body capable of enormous leverage - a cruel body.

compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired