Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

Her bedroom had seemed so pink and young and delicate, appropriate to her pastel-shaded lingerie tossed here and there on chair and bed.

The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger-

Isn't Hollywood a dump — in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

A man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

Look here, old sport, he broke out surprisingly. What's your opinion of me, anyhow? A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.

Happiness is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.

I think they're very attractive,' Abe agreed. 'I just don't think they're attractive, that's all.

I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

I don't complain of conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences.

But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.

Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter--as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.

Compromising with events time moves along.

That's my Middle West-not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name.

The bottle of whiskey - the second one - was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who 'felt just as good on nothing at all.

People fall in and out of love all the time. I wonder how they manage it.

How good to have things like this, to be worshipped again, to pretend to have a mystery!

Only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, towards that lost voice across the room.

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work-the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside-the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once.

We are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than we know ourselves.

He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.