Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

There were girls who would tear you apart with their lips.

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while.

Such a pretty girl- to say such wise things.

You are mysterious. I love you. You're beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that's the rarest known combination.

At first I was surprised and confused; then as he lay in his house and didn't move or breathe or speak hour upon hour it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested--interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end.

He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass.

Life begins again when it gets crisp in the fall.

You and I have been happy; we haven't been happy just once, we've been happy a thousand times. . . Forget the past-what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven forever and ever-even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you-turn gently in the water through which you move and sail back.

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

No, interrupted Marcia emphatically. And you're a sweet boy. Come here and kiss me. Horace stopped quickly in front of her. Why do you want me to kiss you? he asked intently. Do you just go round kissing people? Why, yes, admitted Marcia, unruffled. 'At's all life is. Just going around kissing people.

She had caught a cold and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.

I don't give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me and I felt a little dizzy for a while.

Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her.

I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything…Sophisticated — God, I'm sophisticated! (Daisy)

You'll notice a blond person is expected to talk. If a blond girl doesn't talk we call her a 'doll'; if a light-haired man is silent he's considered stupid. Yet the world is full of 'dark silent men' and 'languorous brunettes' who haven't a brain in their heads, but somehow are never accused of the dearth.

It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.

There's so much spring in the air-- there's so much lazy sweetness in your heart.

Their hands touched for an instant, but neither spoke. Silences were becoming more frequent and more delicious.

You're not sentimental?' 'No, I'm romantic-- a sentimental person thinks things will last-- a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't. Sentiment is emotional.

There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.

interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end

She told him in a dozen ways, of which the best was without words, how she had missed him. Her emotion reassured him, promised his anxious heart that everything would be all right.

I married the heroine of my stories.

Then she kissed him until the sky seemed to fade out and all her smiles and tears to vanish in an ecstasy of eternal seconds.