Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

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.

First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and roared-really all the banalities about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.

I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News.'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.

you once liked me, didn't you?, he asked. LIKED you- I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

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.

I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.

Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains...

and will I like being called a jazz baby? --You will love it.

I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.

I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams

The track curved and now it was going away from the sun, which as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.

You should have risen above it, I said smugly. It's not a slam at you when people are rude -- it's a slam at the people they've met before.

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.

People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.

He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive.

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped form him - as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.

Possibly it had occurred to him the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. [...] It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

We all must try to be good.

There's no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it at all.