Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

You can't live forever, you can't live forever.

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life—not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.

Et nous luttons ainsi, barques à contre-courant, refoulés sans fin vers notre passé.

So the men did, and they died.

You two start on home, Daisy,' said Tom. 'In Mr Gatsby's car.' She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn. 'Go on. He won't annoy you. I think he realises that his presumptuous little flirtation is over.

Let's build a town where

being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only good, warmed by its only lights.

Misfortune is liable to make me a damn bad man.

a man knows things and when he stops knowing things he's like anybody else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things.

The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and, turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbour's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars.

A very confused, very juvenile moment of awkward backings and bumpings followed, and everyone found himself talking to the person he least desired to. Isabella manoeuvred herself and Froggy Parker, freshman at Harvard, with whom she had once played hop-scotch, to a seat on the stairs. A humorous reference to the past was all she needed. The things Isabelle could do socially with one idea were remarkable.

unloved women have no biographies—they have histories.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

From the first Amory loved Princeton -- its lazy beauty, its half-grasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of the rushes, the handsome, prosperous big-game crowds

Talent doesn't starve any more. Even art gets enough to eat these days. Artists draw your magazine covers, write your advertisements, hash out rag-time for your theatres. By the great commercializing of printing you've found a harmless, polite occupation for every genius who might have carved his own niche. But beware the artist who's an intellectual also.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you - like music to the musician or Marxism to the communist - or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of blase sophistication.

is the most opulent, most gorgeous land on earth—a land whose wisest are but little wiser than its dullest; a land where the rulers have minds like little children and the law-givers believe in Santa Claus; where ugly women control strong men—

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

He asked her if she thought he was conceited. She said there was a difference between conceit and self-confidence. She adored self-confidence in men.

I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. one thing I know. If living isn't' a seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.

social barriers as artificial distinctions made by the strong to bolster up their weak retainers and keep out the almost strong. Having

forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath

The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o'clock to the golden beauty of four. Afterward he walked through the dull ache of a setting sun when even the clouds seemed bleeding...