Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

If one can't be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to be a great criminal.

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.

Aprendamos a mostrar nuestra amistad por alguien cuando está vivo y no después de muerto

happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than

But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing them: "Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.

I wish I'd done everything on earth with you.

J'aimerais attraper un de ces nuages roses, vous y enfermer, et vous envoyer rouler dans l'espace.

Es invariablemente triste mirar con nuevos ojos las cosas en las que uno ha gastado su propio poder de adaptación.

Like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars

Ninguna cantidad de fuego o frescura puede desafiar lo que un hombre puede almacenar en los fantasmas de su corazón.

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach.

J'ai voulu les quitter, mais ils ont refusé de me laisser partir — ma présence leur semblait sans doute plus rassurante qu'une complète solitude.

No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

I'd rather look at all these famous people in—in oblivion.

These dead, he knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with blue flashing eyes, the spare violent bodies, the souls made of new earth in the forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century.

Breathing dreams like air.

He would be a different person henceforward, and in his raw state he had bizarre feelings of what his new self would be.

Then you don't think the artist works from his intelligence? No. He goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him what constitutes material. But after all every writer writes because it's his mode of living.

wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be

I don't understand yet how it all happened.' 'Neither do I.' He smiled grimly. 'I guess these baby parties are pretty rough affairs.

The world only exists in your eyes-- your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to.

There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby's enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour.

She was dressed in pale green, and a gold ribbon bound back her dark, straight hair like a crown.

Anyhow, he gives large parties," said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. "And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.