Quotes from F Scott Fitzgerald

She did not plan; she merely let herself go, and the overwhelming life in her did the rest.

Her life was the significant pause between two glances in a mirror. ( paraphrased from The Beautiful and Damned)

He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

Aren't you interested in anything except yourself? Not much.

her youth passed in renaissance glory

it was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.

After all what is brilliance? Merely the tact to sow when no one is looking and reap when every one is.

Faces swirled about him, a kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin- too fat, too lean, yet floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm passionate breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious.

And, naturally, the city caught the contagious air of entre - the working girls, poor ugly souls, wrapping soap in the factories and showing finery in the big stores, dreamed that perhaps in the spectacular excitement of this winter they might obtain for themselves the coveted male - as in a muddled carnival crowd an inefficient pickpocket may consider his chances increased.

Try fiction, suggested Tom. Trouble is I get distracted when I start to write stories - get afraid I'm doing it instead of living -

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget.

In case there's a fire or a flood, or any act of God.

This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.

In bed that night with the lights out and the cool room swimming with moonlight, Anthony lay awake and played with every minute of the day like a child playing in turn with each one of a pile of long-wanted Christmas toys.

Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired to that June night.

Amory smiled discreetly...'But beware the artist who's an intellectual also. The artist who doesn't fit--the Rousseau, the Tolstoi, the Samuel Butler, the Amory Blaine-

Amory said to himself that there were essentially two sorts of people who through natural clarity or disillusion left the enclosure and sought the labyrinth.

I love her and that is the beginning and end of everything.

There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes;

He was paying some tribute to things unforgotten.

As for the well-known Amory, he would write immortal literature if he were sure enough to risk telling anyone else about it. There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.

I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

People like us can't adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is concerned—we'd just make asses of ourselves.