Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

What are you looking at? I was just thinking that you're going to be rather happy. Nicole was frightened: Am I? All right--things couldn't be worse than they have been.

Wir sollten lernen, einem Mann unsere Freundschaft zu zeigen, solange er lebt, und nicht erst, wenn er tot ist.

Most of all she wanted him to know how she loved him, now that the fact was upsetting everything, now that she was walking over the battlefield in a thrilling dream.

like an angry diamond

I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on - I've seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have been hung — glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.

Give me some bacon and eggs and coffee, please. The

I glanced back once. A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby's house, making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

Gradually he realized that he was really walking up University Place, self-conscious about his suitcase, developing a new tendency to glare straight ahead when he passed any one.

Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world - they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them.

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.

always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world. --- quoted by Evan Osnos to describe the rapidly urbanising China

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her, If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry 'Lover, golf-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!' --

He was born sleepless without a talent for rest or the desire for it. --Cecelia Brady about Stahr

negroes' voices floated drowsily back, mingled in an air that she had heard them singing before. "Time is

You were brought up to work--not especially to marry. Now you've found your first nut to crack and it's a good nut--go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him-- whatever happens it can't spoil you because economically you're a boy, not a girl.

Gatsby croyait en la lumière verte, en l'extatique avenir qui d'année en année recule devant nous. Il nous a échappé ! Qu'importe ! Demain nous courrons plus vite, nos bras s'étendront plus loin... Et un beau matin... C'est ainsi que nous avançons, barques luttant contre un courant qui nous rejette sans cesse vers le passé.

I'm going to start being that. I don't like being twenty-two. I hate it more than anything in the world.

I just think of people, she continued, whether they seem right where they are and fit into the picture. I don't mind if they don't do anything. I don't see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when anybody does anything. You don't want to do anything? I want to sleep.

Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.

It was themselves he gave back to them, blurred by the compromises of how many years.

I'm glad it's a girl. I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

It was the same feeling that had oppressed her at the hotel—accustomed to seeing the starkest grotesqueries of a continent heavily underlined as comedy or tragedy, untrained to the task of separating out the essential for herself, she now began to feel that French life was empty and stale.