F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?" -”

“Beauty and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-”

“They were careless people ... 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 . . . . ”

“Aunque no estaba propiamente enamorado, sentía una especie de tierna curiosidad.”

“Sometimes I don't know if Zelda isn't a character that I created myself.”

“We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives-experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded in just that way ever before.”

“You and I have been happy; we haven't been happy just once, we've been happy a thousand times. . . Forget the past-what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven forever and ever-even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you-turn gently in the water through which you move and sail back.”

“We ruined ourselves-I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.”

“Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive.”

“Me gustaba pasear por la Quinta Avenida y elegir a alguna mujer romántica entre la multitud e imaginar que, en cinco minutos, yo entraría en su vida, y que nunca lo sabría nadie ni nadie lo desaprobaría.”

“You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.”

“Gondold csak el, mennyire szeretsz most – suttogta Nicole. – Nem kérem, hogy mindig így szeress, csak azt akarom, hogy ezt sose felejtsd el. Valahol bennem mindig ott él majd az a személy, aki ma este vagyok.”

“A jó modor annak beismerése, hogy minden ember törékeny, és így csak kesztyűs kézzel szabad bánni vele. Na mármost, az emberi tisztelet… az ember nem könnyen mond egy másik embert gyávának vagy hazugnak, de ha valaki azzal tölti az életét, hogy mások érzelmeit kíméli, a mások hiúságát táplálja, végleg elveszti minden érzékét ahhoz, hogy felismerje, mit kell valóban tisztelnie bennük.”

“Évszázadok telnek még el, mire egy amazon végre képes lesz fölfogni azt a tényt, hogy a férfi kizárólag a büszkeségében sebezhető meg, de ha ezt egyszer megrobbantják, törékeny lesz az egész ember, akár a tojás.”

“Involuntarily I glanced seaward and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby, he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”

“They damned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them ‘clever.”

“A pause; it endured horribly.”

“I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything…Sophisticated — God, I’m sophisticated! (Daisy)”

“but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.”

“In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual «There!» yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.”

“He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American - that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games.”

“I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe - and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me.”

“They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.”

“The breathless idyl of their engagement gave way, first, to the intense romance of the more passionate relationship. The breathless idyl left them, fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day it and it was gone, how, they scarcely knew. Had either of them lost the other in the days of the idyl, the love lost would have been ever to the loser that dim desire without fulfillment which stands back of all life. But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain...”

“Rather nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.”

“What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe - why, intelligence never built a steam-engine! Circumstances built a steam-engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.”

“He found that the business of optimism was no mean task.”

“It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.”

“Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that...”

“The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.”

“There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.”

“Poetry is dying first. It'll be absorbed into prose sooner or later.”

“The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.”

“A man's social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich.”

“Te mondod folyton, hogy az embernek egyre több dolgot kell megismernie, és ha ezt abbahagyja, olyan lesz, mint a többi ember, és hogy addig kell elérnie valamit, míg ezt a folytonos megismerést abba nem hagyja.”

“Cuando sientas deseos de criticar a alguien” -fueron sus palabras- “recuerda que no todo el mundo ha tenido las mismas oportunidades que tú tuviste.”

“She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game”

“There are times when you almost tell the harmless old lady next door what you really think of her face—that it ought to be on a night-nurse in a house for the blind; when you’d like to ask the man you’ve been waiting ten minutes for if he isn’t all overheated from racing the postman down the block; when you nearly say to the waiter that if they deducted a cent from the bill for every degree the soup was below tepid the hotel would owe you half a dollar; when—and this is the infallible earmark of true exasperation—a smile affects you as an oil-baron’s undershirt affects a cow’s husband.But the moment passes. Scars may remain on your dog or your collar or your telephone receiver, but your soul has slid gently back into its place between the lower edge of your heart and the upper edge of your stomach, and all is at peace.”

“Pero a mi lado se encontraba Jordan, que, a diferencia de Daisy, era demasiado lista para llevar sueños, ya olvidados, de una era a otra.”

“Everyone suspects themselves of at least one of the cardinal virtues...”

“As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams-not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart”

“Life opened up in one if its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: 'Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.' On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.”

“All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory's love waned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms, nor were they stretched to meet her as in the week before. For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homewards and let new lights come in with the sun.”

“I'd rather keep it as a beautiful memory-- tucked away in my heart.' 'Yes, women can do that-- but not men. I'd remember always, not the beauty of it while it lasted, but just the bitterness, the long bitterness.' 'Don't!”

“Another sigh came from the window-- quite a resigned sigh. 'She's life and hope and happiness, my whole world now.' He felt the quiver of a tear on his eyelid.”

“You're not sentimental?' 'No, I'm romantic-- a sentimental person thinks things will last-- a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't. Sentiment is emotional.”

“I like temperamental men.' 'There aren't any. Men don't know how to be really angry or really happy-- and the ones that do, go to pieces.”

“And now Rosalind enters. Rosalind is-- utterly Rosalind. She is one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them. Two types of men seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. All others are hers by natural prerogative.”

“Tom, I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.”

“The grass is full of ghost to-night.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.”