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A Short Autobiography

Book by F. Scott Fitzgerald · 5 quotes · Writing, Children, Comradery

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A Short Autobiography Quotes

“I lived here once," the author said after a moment. "Here? For a long time?" "No. For just a little while when I was young." "It must have been rather cramped." "I didn't notice." "Would you like to try it again?" "No. And I couldn't if I wanted to." He shivered slightly and closed the windows. As they went downstairs, the visitor said, half apologetically: "It's really just like all houses, isn't it?" The author nodded. "I didn't think it was when I built it, but in the end I suppose it's just like other houses after all.”

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“That we shall use every discovery of science in the preservation of our children's health goes without saying; but we shall do more than this - we shall give them a free start, not loading them up with our own ideas and experiences, nor advising them to live according to our lights. We were burned in the fire here and there, but - who knows? - fire may not burn our children, and if we warn them away from it they may end by never growing warm. We will not even inflict our cynicism on them as the sentimentality of our fathers was inflicted on us. The most we will do is urge a little doubt, asking that the doubt be exercised on our ideas as well as on all the mortal things in this world.”

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“...I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved - and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact - and rather deeply wise. More than that, what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Cather's: "We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.”

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“I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.”

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