Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

Their eyes met, locked, became wistful, and dreamy and beautiful.

One thin's sure and nothing's surer The rich get richer and the poor get — children. In the meantime, In between time...

Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal--with an effort he choked back the impulse. You're just the romantic age, she continued--fifty. Twenty-five is too wordly-wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is--oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.

He cared only about people; he was scarcely conscious of places except for their weather, until they had been invested with color by tangible events.

Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush-these alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth-bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love's exaltation.

The reaction came when he realized the waste and extravagance involved. He somtimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust.

It is youth's felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future - flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.

It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy--it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.

It never ocurred to him that he was a passive thing, acted upon by an influence above and beyond Gloria, that he was merely the sensitive plate on which the photograph was made. Some gargantuan photographer had focused the camera on Gloria and Snap! - the poor plate could but develop, confined like all things to its nature.

When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love.

It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.

You will admit that if it was not life it was magnificent.

Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost uncanny pull at each others hearts.

Want any of this stuff? Jordan?... Nick? I didn't answer. Nick? he asked again. What? Want any? No... I just remembered that today's my birthday. I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say.

Involuntarily I glanced seaward and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby, he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty.

but they were frightened at his survivant will, once a will to live, now become a will to die.

Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

At this point Jordan and I tried to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we remain - as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions.

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.

I'm more beautiful than anybody else," she said brokenly, "why can't I be happy?