Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.

Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.

She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game

I guess I'm the Black Death,' he said slowly. 'I don't seem to bring people happiness any more.

There was nothing, it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure.

Two souls are sometimes created together and in love before they're born

he was figuratively following along beside her as she walked the fence, ready to catch her if she should fall.

He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.

The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.

A squalid phantasmagoria of breath

The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alivewith chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.

She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper.

I want it to smell of magnolias instead of peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on the same gravel that Lee's boots crunched on. There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--

In the morning you were never violently sorry-- you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.

I see you're looking at my cuff buttons. I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now.

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his.

i was perhaps an egotist in youth, but i soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.

the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice-box with the left overs.

To be afraid, a person has either to be very great and strong-- or else a coward. I'm neither.