Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

What was it? Why won't you tell me? I don't want to break down your illusions. My dear man, I have no illusions about you. I mean illusions about yourself.

I want to do everything in the world with you.

I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe - and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me.

She is the most charming person in the world. That's all. I refuse to amplify. Excepting- she's perfect.

Così continuamo a remare, barche contro corrente, risospinti senza posa nel passato.

When the lightning strikes one of us, it strikes both

Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

And so we beat on, books against the critics, borne back ceaslessly into rewrites.

I was too absorbed to be responsive

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea--if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.

He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

So he nodded, smiled, listened, was happy.

It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

They're such beautiful shirts,' she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. 'It makes me sad because I've never seen such - such beautiful shirts before.

I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.

I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes-there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.

It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care.

If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.

I'm merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence.