Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Work

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' is a timeless narrative that delves into the lives of the wealthy elite during the 1920s. The story follows Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire, and his pursuit of the elusive Daisy Buchanan, a woman from his past. The novel is renowned for its vivid portrayal of the era's excesses and the disillusionment that followed, offering a critical commentary on the American Dream. more

Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, renowned for his works that encapsulate the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties. His most celebrated novel, 'The Great Gatsby,' is a critical and commercial success, reflecting the themes of the American Dream and the decline of the American upper class. more

You May Also Like

“No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock - until long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how now the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about... like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding towards him through amorphous trees. - (Page 132)”

“I am scared to even say this out loud, because I worry that having confessed this fragility, you now know where to punch. I know that if I am hit where I am earnest, I will never recover. It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism and hide behind the great walls of irony and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it through the claude glass. But I want to be earnest, even if it's embarrassing. The photographer Alec Soth has said, "to me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability. I would go a step further and argue that you cannot see the beauty which is enough unless you make yourself vulnerable to it." So I try to turn toward that scattered light, belly out and I tell myself, "this doesn't look like a picture, and it doesn't look like a god. It is a sunset, and it is beautiful." And this whole thing you've been doing where nothing gets five stars because nothing is perfect, that's bullshit. So much is perfect. Starting with this.”

“Proven professionals know that by focusing on quality, you can’t lose with the classics and your clothes will last longer. It’s not about having expensive clothing, it is about having style.”

“I stop believing in the future. There's a character in Jacqueline Woodson's novel 'If You Come Softly' who says that he looks into the future and sees only 'this big blank space where I should be.' When I think of the future, I start to only see the big blank space, the whyless bright terror. As for the present, it hurts. Everything hurts. The pain ripples beneath my skin, bone-shocking. What's the point of all this pain and yearning? Why?”