Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gatsby took up his drink. 'They certainly look cool,' he said, with visible tension. We drank in long greedy swallows.

Part of the enchantment of Paris in the Twenties was that everything that happened there seemed to have something to do with art.

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!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. "I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She'll see.

Well, if someone is a bad driver and all the other drivers around them are good drivers, then they are safe because all the good drivers will dodge the bad driver so that there is no car crash. But if there is another bad driver, then there can be a crash.

Ses yeux gris, brûlés de, soleil, restaient fixés sur la route, mais de sa propre initiative elle venait de modifier nos relations, et pendant un moment j'ai cru que je l'aimais.

Je crois que cette voix l'attachait plus que tout, avec ses inflexions exaltantes, envoûtantes, car aucun de ses rêves n'aurait pu en imaginer de plus belle — cette voix était un chant d'immortalité.

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. (2)

I read somewhere that the sun's getting hotter every year,' said Tom genially. 'It seems that pretty soon the earth's going to fall into the sun—or wait a minute—it's just the opposite—the sun's getting colder every year.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

Chacun se flatte de posséder en propre l'une au moins des vertus cardinales. Voici la mienne: je suis l'un des très rares hommes foncièrement honnêtes que je connaisse.

Está bien, dije, estoy agradecida de que sea una niña. Y espero que ella sea una tonta... eso es lo mejor que puede ser una niña en este mundo, una tontita hermosa...

La propia ciudad, a pesar de que ella se hubiese ido estaba impregnada de una belleza melancólica [...] Alargó la mano desesperadamente como para atrapar solo una brizna de aire, para salvar un fragmento del lugar que ella había hecho precioso para él. Pero todo pasaba demasiado deprisa ya para sus ojos empañados y supo que había perdido para siempre aquella parte que era la más pura y la mejor.

She did not want him to be like other men, yet here were the same exigent demands, as if he wanted to take some of herself away carry it off in his pocket.

I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn't been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy's eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment

You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride." "I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor." She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

Basil, is that you? No, mother, it's a burglar.

I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before,' he said, nodding determinedly. 'She'll see.

She told herself that the years had brought her tolerance—actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed of moral courage.

Je les ai regardé une dernière fois, et ils m'ont rendu mon regard, mais de très loin, sur la rive d'une autre vie. J'ai donc quitté la pièce et descendu les marches, sous la pluie, les laissant là, ensemble.

Time with Rosemary was self-indulgence - time with Collis was nothing plus nothing.

Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

He was his wife's man and not his own.

Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees — he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.