Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love.

held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see.

Americans were saying good-by in voices that mimicked the cadence of water running into a large old bathtub.

Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

E assim, com o sol brilhando e vendo uma imensa quantidade de folhas brotando nos galhos das árvores, no mesmo ritmo espantoso daqueles filmes em câmera acelerada, senti aquela familiar convicção de que, junto com o verão, a vida recomeçava.

She looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.

But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.

The way he looked at Julia made her feel attractive. For half an hour, as their sentences floated pleasantly among the scent of violets and snowdrops, forget-me-nots and pansies, her interest in him grew.

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.… High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl.…

One of the pilots asked Mr. Smith if he liked his business, and Mr. Smith said, Sure. Sure I like it. It's nice being the only sound nut in a hatful of cracked ones. ---Stewardess to Cecelia Brady

Elle disait ce qui lui passait par la tête, mais avec une chaleur bouleversante, comme si, à travers ces mots chuchotés, frémissants, son cÅ"ur essayait de se faire entendre.

It occurred to him that all strongly accentuated classes, such as the military, divided men into two kinds: their own kind—and those without.

Young men just don't drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island.

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.' He

The very weather seems to have a quality of the past, faded weather like that of old photographs.

Think of it as if you were standing on one of those globes with a map on it — I always wanted one when I was a boy." "I understand," she said after a minute. "When you do that, you can feel the earth turn, can't you?" He nodded. "Yes. Otherwise it's all just mañana — waiting for the morning or the moon.

Anyhow he gives large parties,' said Jordan, changing the subject with an urbane distaste for the concrete. 'And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.

superior couples holding each other tortuously

My dear boy, there's your big mistake. This has nothing to do with will-power; that's a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack judgement--the judgement to decide at once when you know your imagination will play you false, given half a chance.

As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets.

It was good to be hard, then; all nice people were hard on themselves.

They ate sandwiches of mortadel sausage and bel paese cheese made up in the station restaurant, and drank Beaujolais.

They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm as June, and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he must speak. 'I think,' he said and his voice trembled, 'that if I lost faith in you I'd lose faith in God.' She looked at him with such a started face that he asked her the matter. 'Nothing,' she said slowly, 'only this: five men have said that to me before, and it frightens me.

No,' she said; 'I'd never marry again. I've got my two children and I want myself for them. I like you--I like all clever men, you more than any--but you know me well enough to know that I'd never marry a clever man--' She broke off suddenly.