F. Scott Fitzgerald

This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“He was intensely ritualistic, startlingly dramatic, loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate, and rather liked his neighbor.” (Pg 28)

“But I hate to get anywhere by working for it.” (Pg 52)

“All diamonds look big in the rough.” (Pg 53)

“Often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself.” (Pg 117)

“There is no such thing as a strong, sane criminal.” (Pg 145)

“I can never judge a man while he’s talking.” (Pg 157)

“You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one ting in the world, your imagination.” (Pg 157)

“If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.” (Pg 168)

“So if you don’t use heaven as a continual referendum for your ideas you’ll find earth a continual recall to your ambitions.” (Pg 174)

“It’s better to leave the blustering and tremulo-heroism to the middle classes; they do it so much better.” (Pg 175)

“The only excuse for women was the necessity for a disturbing element among men.” (Pg 187)

“Men don’t know how to be really angry or really happy – and the ones that do, go to pieces.” (Pg 189)

“I’m romantic – a sentimental person thinks things will last – a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t. Sentiment is emotional.” (Pg 193)

“Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.” (Pg 201)

“I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.” (Pg 205)

“I discovered that physical courage depends to a great extent on the physical shape a man is in.” (Pg 228)

“Men can stand anything if they get used to it.” (Pg 228)

“The world is so overgrown that it can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning on being such an important finger.” (Pg 231)

“My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity.” (Pg 232)

“Why don’t you tell me that ‘ if the girl had been worth having she’d have waited for you?’ No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.” (Pg 234)

“Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be behaded the day he finished it.” (Pg 235)

“Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring.” (Pg 251)

“It’s rotten that every bit of real love in the world is ninety-nine per cent passion and one little soupcon of jealousy.” (Pg 258-259)

“Intellect is no protection from sex any more than convention is.” (Pg 259)

“To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him.” (Pg 267)

“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood – she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” (Pg 282)

“Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.” (Pg 287)

“Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.” (Pg 290)

“Money isn’t the only stimulus that brings out the best that’s in a man, even in America.” (Pg 298)

“I simply state that I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation.” (Pg 303)

“Weak things were often beautiful, weak things were never good.” (Pg 305)

“I know myself, but that is all.” (Pg 308)

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” (Pg 1)

“Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.” (Pg 4)

“That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” (Pg 17)

“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” (Pg 49)

“Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” (Pg 59)

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.” (Pg 79)

“There was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.” (Pg 124)

“There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.” (Pg 125)

“Human sympathy has its limits.” (Pg 135)

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.” (Pg 172)

“I’m thirsty, I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.” (Pg 177)

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” (Pg 180)

The Beautiful and the Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Life was a struggle against death, that waited at every corner.” (Pg 6)

“Art isn’t meaningless.”

“It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.” (Pg 20)

“Oh, God! One minute it’s my world, and the next I’m the world’s fool.” (Pg 28)

“A classic is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation.” (Pg 39)

“It’s me who tries again and again to be moved – let myself go a thousand times and I’m always me. Nothing – quite – stirs me.” (Pg 42)

“I detest reformers, especially the sort who try to reform me.” (Pg 49)

“He says unloved women have no biographies – they have histories.” (Pg 52)

“When a man speaks he’s merely tradition. He has at best a few thousand years back of him. But woman, why, she is the miraculous mouthpiece of posterity.” (Pg 80)

“Such a kiss – it was a flower held against the face, never to be described, scarcely to be remembered; as though her beauty were giving off emanations of itself which settled transiently and already dissolving upon his heart.” (Pg 83)

“The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third – before long the best lines cancel out – and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture.” (Pg 90)

“A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.” (Pg 92)

“Happiness is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.” (Pg 104)

“I’m gradually losing faith in any man being susceptible to fatal injuries.” (Pg 119)

“Husbands are so often ‘husbands’ and I must marry a lover.” (Pg 119)

“Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one.” (Pg 120)

“I think marriage is an error of youth.” (Pg 125)

“Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they’re preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them.” (Pg 136)

“Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.” (Pg 136)

“It is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before.” (Pg 138)

“It is the manner of life seldom to strike but always to wear away.” (Pg 164)

“I was adept at fooling the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me.” (Pg 205)

“I learned a little of beauty – enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth.” (Pg 205)

“We produce a Christ who can raise up the leper – and presently the breed of the leper is the salt of the earth. If any one can find any lesson in that, let him stand forth.” (Pg 207)

“What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its packings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.” (Pg 208)

“Intelligence is little more than a short-foot rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of circumstances.” (Pg 209)

“Thank God we four can all pass to our eternal rest knowing we’ve lest the world a little better for having lived in it.” (Pg 210)

“Trouble is if you started to punish ignorance you’d have to begin in the first families, then you could take up the moving picture people, and finally Congress and the clergy.” (Pg 218)

“It has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future.” (Pg 231)

“I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.” (Pg 247)

“Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves.” (Pg 294-295)

“Wars were made for armies and not armies for wars.” (Pg 305)

“Every man is born a success, he makes himself a failure.” (Pg 309)

“You can’t park your pessimism in my little sun parlor.” (Pg 333)

“There was nothing, it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure.” (Pg 341)

Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“There was never any doubt at whom he was looking or talking – and this is a flattering attention, for who looks at us? – glances fall upon us, curious or disinterested, nothing more.” (Pg 27)

“She knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silnt, contributing just her share of urbane humor with a precision that approached meagerness.” (Pg 34)

“Save among a few of the tough-minded and perennially suspicious, he had the power of arousing a fascinated and unctritical love.” (Pg 35)

“I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.” (Pg 47)

“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 exonomically you’re a boy, not a girl.” (Pg 49)

“When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It’s better to be cold and young than to love. It’s happened to me before but never like this – so accidental – just when everything was going well.” (Pg 50)

“There are lots of people dead sice and we’ll all be dead soon.” (Pg 67)

“I used to think until you’re eighteen nothing matters.”

                     “And afterward it’s the same way.” (Pg 72)

“Not only are you beautiful but you are somehow on the grand scale. Everythning you do, like pretending to be in love or pretending to be shy gets across.” (Pg 74)

“She did not know yet that splendor is something in the heart; at the moment when she realized that and melted into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret.” (Pg 75)

“Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do – they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.” (Pg 78)

“The word meant different things to them.” (Pg 79)

“The strongest guard is plaed at the gateway to nothing, maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.” (Pg 81)

“I prefer people whose lives have more corrugated surfaces.” (Pg 84)

“When people have so much for outsiders didn’t it indicate a lack of inner intensity.” (Pg 87)

“Don’t you know you can’t do anything about people?” (Pg 91)

“He felt so intensely about people that in moments of apathy he preferred to remain concealed; that one could parade a casualness into his presence was a challenge to the key on which he lived.” (Pg 100)

“It was a tradition between them that they should never be too tired for anything, and they found it made the days better on the whole and put the evenings in order.” (Pg 109)

“There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything.” (Pg 122)

“Well, I think love is all there is or should be.” (Pg 140)

“He used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, tooo, if he could fit it in.” (Pg 152)

“I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.” (Pg 182)

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.” (Pg 189)

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrink sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wouds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we shold there is nothing to be done about it.” (Pg 190)

“Man is vulnerable only in his pride, but delicate as Humpty-Dumpty once that is meddled with.” (Pg 200)

“Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect – you don’t call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.” (Pg 200)

“Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on evey inch of flesh and spirit.” (Pg 208)

“But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it.” (Pg 215)

“Think how you love me. I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night” (Pg 225)

“Fine dives had been made from flimsier spring-boards.” (Pg 230)

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives.” (Pg 232)

“But you never know how you once felt. Do you?” (Pg 244)

“It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life – it can be a superabundance of interest.” (Pg 287)

“But the meanings are different – in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can’t be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too.” (Pg 300)

“But women marry all their husbands’ talens and naturally, afterwards, are not so impressed with them as they may keep up the pretense of being.” (Pg 313)

“You know, you’re a little complicated after all.”

                      “Oh no, I’m not really – I’m just a – I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.” (Pg 325)

“Better a sane crook than a mad puritan.” (Pg 326)

“When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.” (Pg 346)

“If you don’t like nice people, try the ones who aren’t nice, and see how you like that!” (Pg 347)