Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is a loneliness that only exists in the mind. The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their world fall apart and all they can do is stare blankly.

My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.

I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't repeat the past.' 'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!' 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.

Y así vamos adelante, botes que reman contra la corriente, incesantemente arrastrados hacia el pasado.

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

I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved - and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact - and rather deeply wise. More than that, what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Cather's: We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen. Always

It is not unlikely that she would have accepted any idea encased in this radiant formula—which was perhaps not a formula; it was the reductio ad absurdum of all formulas.

Collis, unaware that he was without a wedding garment, heralded his arrival with: I reckon I'm late--the beyed has flown.

As the conversation continued in stilted commas, Anthony wondered that to him and Bloeckman both this girl had once been the most stimulating, the most tonic personality they had ever known—and now the three sat like overoiled machines, without conflict, without fear, without elation, heavily enamelled little figures secure beyond enjoyment in a world where death and war, dull emotion and noble savagery were covering a continent with the smoke of terror. In

Az embernek táplálék kell az élet mindkét végén: elÅ'bb anyamell – aztán szentély. Ami mellé odaheveredhet, amikor már senkinek nincsen szüksége rá…

Well I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything

She had been kissed once and made love to six times.

he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. ...He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.

BEAUTY: Bogus? What is bogus? THE VOICE: That, too, you will discover in this land. You will find much that is bogus. Also, you will do much that is bogus.

It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people.

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...

He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want—not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable.

He held her hand and she gave him such a look that he whispered her name aloud.

He knew women early and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.

as in a muddled carnival crowd an inefficient pickpocket may consider his chances increased.

he was learning the rarity in a single life, of encountering true emotion.

agonizingly aware of the money in the vicinity and convinced it was theirs for a few words in the right key

Softly the two names lingered on the air, died away more slowly than other words, other names, slower than music in the mind.