F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes:

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.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

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.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

Her face, the face of a saint, a viking Madonna, shone through the faint motes that snowed across the candlelight, drew down its flush from the wine-colored lanterns in the pine. She was still as still.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

They were uncertain, resentful, and somewhat ill at ease. This they hid by pretending an elaborate relief at being out of the army, and by assuring each other that military discipline should never again rule their stubborn, liberty-loving wills. Yet, as a matter of fact, they would have felt more at home in a prison than in this newfound and unquestionable freedom.

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed.

I'll never be a poet,' said Amory as he finished. 'I'm not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don't catch the subtle things like 'silver-snarling trumpets.' I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never right anything but mediocre poetry.

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."

It'd be a good setting to jump overboard,' said Dick mildly.'Wouldn't it?' agreed Nicole hastily. 'Let's borrow life-preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained."

I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all along."

After marriage came elation, and then, gradually, the growth of weariness. Responsibility descended upon Merlin, the responsibility of making his thirty dollars a week and her twenty suffice to keep them respectably fat and to hide with decent garments the evidence that they were."

But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room."

As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand."

When a man is tired of life on his 21st birthday it indicates that he is rather tired of something in himself.

Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

I think they're very attractive,' Abe agreed. 'I just don't think they're attractive, that's all.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.

There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.

Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped form him - as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.

Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen...

First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and roared-really all the banalities about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.

Of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one. . . . Vitality never "takes." You have it or you haven't it, like health or brown eyes or a baritone voice.

To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.

I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American.

I guess I'm the Black Death,' he said slowly. 'I don't seem to bring people happiness any more.

...I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires....

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. 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.

A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.

And in the end, we were all just humans...Drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.

Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.

Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.

Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.

He did not understand all he had heard, but from his clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad.

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

The men--the undergraduates of Yale and Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better-looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country.

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

I love this simply because it's cute, and I guess it's a sign of the times in many respect. It's pretty much saying you complete me, only in the sweetest way possible.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

Intelligence is measured by a person's ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.

That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

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.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I hate dainty minds,' answered Marjorie. 'But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it.

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was ....

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

that voice was a deathless song.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.

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.

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.

Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

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 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. [- Nick Carroway]

She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

Isn't Hollywood a dump-in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

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.

At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby [is] my imaginary eldest brother.

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.

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?

The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn East and North toward them - this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air.

Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.

Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.

God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!

Forgotten is forgiven.

The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaiety, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

Take off that darn fur coat!...Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows.

Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure.

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.

And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.

It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.