F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Then she was in the air, and Carlyle involuntarily held his breath. He had not realized that the dive was nearly forty feet. It seemed an eternity before he heard the swift compact sound as she reached the sea. And it was with his glad sigh of relief when her light watery laughter curled up the side of the cliff and into his anxious ears that he knew he loved her.”

“Girls like you are responsible for all the tiresome colorless marriages; all those ghastly inefficiencies that pass as feminine qualities. What a blow it must be when a man with imagination marries the beautiful bundle of clothes that he's been building ideals around, and finds that she's just a weak, whining, cowardly mass of affectations!”

“Nancy had a mouth like a remembered kiss...”

“I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.”

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

“Love is fragile -- she was thinking -- but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love-words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.”

“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material. ”

“There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he'd kissed a girl, everyone knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same, everyone knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.”

“The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.”

“He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.”

“An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.”

“I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.”

“Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

“They always believe that 'things are in a bad way now,' but they 'haven't any faith in these idealists.' One minute they call Wilson 'just a dreamer, not practical'- a year later they rail at him for making his dreams realities. They haven't clear logical ideas on one single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all change. They don't think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won't see that if they don't pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we're going round and round in a circle. That- is the great middle class.”

“How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his.”

“Amory: I love you.Rosalind: I love you- now.”

“my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.”

“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I like to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

“he could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and contour.”

“You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.”

“I've got an adjective that just fits you.”

“Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain.”

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”

“I want leisure to read—an immense amount.”

“There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.”

“It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future”

“When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm”

“The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.”

“I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”

“He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and café, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.”

“If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired”

“but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game”

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

“He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.”

“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“Will father be there?" she asked.John turned to her in astonishment.Your father is dead," he replied somberly. "Why should he go to Hades? You have it confused with another place that was abolished long ago."After supper they folded up the table-cloth and spread their blankets for the night.What a dream it was," Kismine sighed, gazing up at the stars. "How strange it seems to be here with one dress and a penniless fianc_!Under the stars," she repeated. "I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth."It was a dream," said John quietly. "Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness."How pleasant then to be insane!"So I'm told," said John gloomily. "I don't know any longer. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it." He shivered. "Turn up your coat collar, little girl, the night's full of chill and you'll get pneumonia. His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours."So wrapping himself in his blanket he fell off to sleep.”

“There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.”

“So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.”

“I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.”

“What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”

“For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!”

“It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food." p. 201”

“I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.”

“It was a grey day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn.”

“Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush-these alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth-bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love's exaltation.”

“His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.”

“We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...It has no day.”

“For years afterwards when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it.”

“The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger-”

“he wanted people to like his mind again-after awhile it might be such a nice place in which to live.”