Quotes from F Scott Fitzgerald

She was beautiful, but not like those girls in magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.

You'll understand why storms are named after people.

But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down…. There was kindliness about intoxication – there was the indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings

I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song.

The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath - and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light - light dividing like pearls - forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.

Whenever you feel like criticising any one, just remember that all of the people in the world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

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...

a great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain

Cuando sientas deseos de criticar a alguien" -fueron sus palabras- "recuerda que no todo el mundo ha tenido las mismas oportunidades que tú tuviste.

He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house

I'm p-paralyzed with happiness. - She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and 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. That was a way she had.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man , more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. 'How do you get to West Egg village?' he asked helplessly. I told him. Ans as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He has casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

This is not a time for hereos because nobody will let it happen

Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary they were merely casual events in a crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

In his moments of insecurity he was haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after all, significant.

all the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness, and by that promise giving it

the room had grown smothery. He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the corners of his mind

Everyone suspects themselves of at least one of the cardinal virtues...

I'm paralyzed with happiness

You probably think you know...The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he's succeeded, and the failure because he's failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father's good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father's mistakes.

this midnight my desire will see, shadowed among the embers, furled in flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world

His desire re-created her until she lost all vestiges of the old Jenny, even the girl who had met him at the train that morning. Silently, as the night hours went by, he molded her over into an image of love - an image that would endure as long as love itself, or even longer - not to perish till he could say, 'I never really loved her.