Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.

A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.

all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand

Have a drink Tom and then you won't feel so foolish to yourself.

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

You remind me of a smoked cigarette.

She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.

one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.

He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall.

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

She wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe forever.

I don't want just words. If that's all you have for me, you'd better go.

God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!

Summer has no day,' she said. 'We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...it has no day.

His dark eyes took me in, and I wondered what they would look like if he fell in love.

Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

She laughed with thrilling scorn. Sophisticated-God, I'm sophisticated!

He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real.

He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.

They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.