Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing," he said. "Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.

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

Young Anthony had one picture of his father and mother together—so often had it faced his eyes in childhood that it had acquired the impersonality of furniture, but every one who came into his bedroom regarded it with interest.

As he sat on the side of the bed, he felt the room, the house and the night as empty. In the next room Nicole muttered something in her sleep. For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday, with the added poignance of her perishable beauty.

Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I've read 'This Side of Paradise.

It's been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful.

He liked his barber shop

No... no... We never forgive those we can understand... We can only forgive those who wound us for no reason at all...

and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his.

Sweetness is hard. Real sweetness is a sort of hardness—and strength. ~Lois

I wouldn't think of leaving college. It's just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they're never coming again, and I'm not really getting all I could out of them.

I feel sure we are the great coming nation—yet—and she sighed—I feel my life should have drowsed away close to an older, mellower civilization, a land of greens and autumnal browns—

I've decided to give you up, she said. Dick started - had he said anything to imply that she possessed any part of him?

It was growing colder and the men passing had flipped up the collars of their overcoats.

Oh, sleep that dreams, and dream that never tires, press from the petals of the lotus flower something of this to keep, the essence of an hour.

Wylie: If you don't like advice, why do you pay me? Stahr: That's a question of merchandise. I'm a merchant. I want to buy what's in your mind.

Only Maury Noble remained awake, seated upon the station roof, his eyes wide open and fixed with fatigued intensity upon the distant nucleus of morning. He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house.

It is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before.

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it

He was in an eddy again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire to work or write, love or dissipate.

His expression combined that of a Middle-western farmer appraising his wheat-crop and that of an actor wondering whether he is observed - the public manner of all good Americans.

Goodnight, child. This is a damn shame. Let's drop it out of the picture. He gave her two lines of hospital patter to go to sleep on. So many people are going to love you and it might be nice to meet your first love all intact, emotionally too. That's an old-fashioned idea, isn't it?

Don't say wife. I'm your mistress. Wife's such un ugly word.

And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.