Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

The logic of the suggestion fitted gradually into Abe's pitch – he grew rather enthusiastic about being cared for, or rather about prolonging his state of irresponsibility.

It always astonishes me when anybody does anything

That's my theory: immediate electrocution of all ignorant and dirty people. I'm all for the criminals - give color to life. Trouble is if you started to punish ignorance you'd have to begin in the first families, then you could take up the moving-picture people, and finally Congress and the clergy.

You always look so cool.

If you hated me, if you were covered with sores like a leper, if you ran away with another woman or starved me or beat me—how absurd this sounds—I'd still want you, I'd still love you. I KNOW, my darling.

You can't repeat the past.

calmness wasn't an end in itself

One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year.

I want to write something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned. As usual, F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you don't like nice people, try the ones who aren't nice, and see how you like that!

In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Benjamin discovered that he was becoming more and more attracted by the gay side of life. It

Note also in the epilogue that I want to show that Stahr left certain harm behind him just as he left good behind him.

he found, as the new century gathered headway, that his thirst for gayety grew stronger.

One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great burden of glory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with Amory and Eleanor, dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal beauty and curious elfin love moods. Then they turned out of the moonlight into the trellised darkness of a vine-hung pagoda, where there were scents so plaintive as to be nearly musical.

Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren't just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.

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.

The great rich nation had made triumphant war, suffered enough for poignancy but not enough for bitterness - hence the carnival, the feasting, the triumph.

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to criticise don't blame yourself too much.

Jelly-bean is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular- - I am idling, I have idled, I will idle

There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness.