“I'm not much like myself any more.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!”
Source: F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
“He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.”
Source: The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more
“Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.”
Source: The Beautiful and Damned
“Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.”
“The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.”
Source: The Complete Short Stories, Essays, and a Play
“Stahr's eyes and Kathleen's met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call.”
Source: F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Complete Novels (Book House)
“Once we were one person, and always it will be a little that way.”
Source: A Life in Letters
“It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.”
Source: The Great Gatsby
“Someday I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth.”
Source: The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more
“I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.”
Source: Flappers and Philosophers
“Her fine high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet and shining, the colour of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood -- she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.”
“We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.”
Source: This Side of Paradise
“She wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe forever.”
Source: The Crack-up
“I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.”
Source: The Great Gatsby
“...one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.”
Source: The Great Gatsby
“Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”
“Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea--if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.”
Source: The Offshore Pirate: Short Story
“When the lightning strikes one of us, it strikes both”
Source: This Side of Paradise: American Literature
“She was incurably dishonest.”
Source: The Great Gatsby
“Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.”
Source: The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection
“This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding-- it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.”
Source: Flappers and Philosophers: American Literature
“I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway”
Source: 4 Books by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“You remind me of a smoked cigarette.”
Source: Flappers and Philosophers
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.”
“Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.”
Source: The Beautiful and Damned
“You're a rotten driver,' I protested. 'Either you ought to be more careful or you oughtn't to drive at all.' 'I am careful.' 'No, you're not.' 'Well, other people are,' she said lightly. 'What's that got to do with it?' 'They'll keep out of my way,' she insisted. 'It takes two to make an accident.' 'Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.' 'I hope I never will,' she answered. 'I hate careless people. That's why I like you.' Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her.”
Source: The Great Gatsby
“But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.”
Source: The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more
“He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.”
Source: The Great Gatsby
“What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon,' cried Daisy, 'and the day after that, and the next thirty years?' 'Don't be morbid,' Jordan said. 'Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.' 'But it's so hot,' insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, 'And everything's so confused. Let's all go to town!”
Source: (The Great Gatsby)
“I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.”
Source: The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more
“smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.”
Source: Thank You for the Light
“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go”
Source: Three Novels: Tender is the Night; The Beautiful and Damned; Thi
“We all have souls of different ages”
Source: The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more
“And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.”
Source: F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Complete Novels (Book House)
“He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“Don't say 'wife.' I'm your mistress. Wife's such an ugly word. Your 'permanent mistress' is so much more tangible and desirable… .”
Source: The Beautiful and Damned
“It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.”
Source: 4 Books by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
Source: The Great Gatsby
“You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them--always thinking people are so important--especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it--on the inside.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
