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There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes... By F Scott Fitzgerald Amory Sight Blending Quick Unrelated

He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy. By F Scott Fitzgerald School Combined Work Exasperated Resentful

They were so sorry, dear; they went down to meet each other in a taxi, honey; they had preferences in smiles and had met in Hindustan, and shortly afterward they must have quarrelled, for nobody knew and nobody seemed to care - yet finally one of them had gone and left the other crying, only to feel blue, to feel sad. By F Scott Fitzgerald Hindustan Dear Honey Feel Taxi

McKisco's contacts with the princely classes in America had impressed upon him their uncertain and fumbling snobbery, their delight in ignorance and their deliberate rudeness, all lifted from the English with no regard paid to factors that make English philistinism and rudeness purposeful, and applied in a land where a little knowledge and civility buy more than they do anywhere else - an attitude which reached its apogee in the "Harvard manner" of about 1900. By F Scott Fitzgerald English Harvard Rudeness America Mckisco

They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically when they read ... Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream. By F Scott Fitzgerald Nearer Mentally Read Physically Imaginative

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Things Idealists Uneducated Bad Faith

If you were in a drug store," said Stahr "-having a prescription filled-""You mean a chemist?" Boxley asked."If you were in a chemist's," conceded Stahr, "and you were getting a prescription for some member of your family who was very sick-""-Very ill?" queried Boxley."Very ill. Then whatever caught your attention through the window, whatever distracted you and held you would probably be material for pictures.""A murder outside the window, you mean.""There you go," said Stahr smiling. "It might be a spider working on the pane.""Of course-I see.""I'm afraid you don't, Mr. Boxley. You see it for your medium but not for ours. You keep the spiders for yourself and you try to pin the murders on us. By F Scott Fitzgerald Stahr Chemist Prescription Ill Store

Now, ideals, conventions, even truth itself, are continually changing things so that the milk of one generation may be the poison of the next. The young Americans of my time have seen one of these transformations with their own eyes, and for this reason they will not make the initial mistake of trying to teach their children too much. Before a man is thirty he has already accumulated, along with a little wisdom, a great quantity of dust and rubbish in his mind, and the difficulty is to let the children profit by what is wise without unloading the dust and rubbish on them too. We can only try to do better at it than the last generation did - when a generation succeeds in doing it completely, in handing down all its discoveries and none of its delusions, its children shall inherit the earth. By F Scott Fitzgerald Ideals Conventions Generation Children Truth

Under the stars,' she repeated. 'I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to someone. 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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Dream Stars Repeated John Diamonds

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Love Possibly Summer April Proverbial

Was glad that there was beauty in the world that would not be weighed in the scales of the casting department. By F Scott Fitzgerald Department Glad Beauty World Weighed

And floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn. By F Scott Fitzgerald Sound Scales Trembling Stiff Tinny

When a girl feels that she's perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That's charm By F Scott Fitzgerald Girl Feels Perfectly Groomed Dressed

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Suffer Older People Love Agony

She had come out of her first illness alive with new hopes, expecting so much, yet deprived of any subsistence except Dick, bringing up children she could only pretend gently to love, guided orphans. The people she liked, rebels mostly, disturbed her and were bad for her--she sought in them the vitality that had made them independent or creative or rugged, sought in vain--for their secrets were buried deep in childhood struggles they had forgotten. They were more interested in Nicole's exterior harmony and charm, the other face of her illness. She led a lonely life owning Dick who did not want to be owned. By F Scott Fitzgerald Hopes Expecting Bringing Love Guided

I grew up then, into this life of jazz, and fell immediately into the state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my thoughts. It seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident has brought us to where we could fly in her face. We produce a Christ who can raise up the leper and presently, it's the salt of the Earth. If any one can find lesson in that, let him stand forth. Am I crazy trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge towards truth? Trying to separate the knowable from the unknowable? By F Scott Fitzgerald Life Jazz Confusion Grew Fell

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Nicole Happy Frightened Thinking Things

There was the sun, letting down great glowing masses of heat; there was life, active and snarling, moving about them like a fly swarm - the dark pants of smoke from the engine, a crisp "all aboard!" and a bell ringing. Confusedly Maury saw eyes in the milk train staring curiously up at him, heard Gloria and Anthony in quick controversy as to whether he should go to the city with her, then another clamor and she was gone and the three men, pale as ghosts, were standing alone upon the platform while a grimy coal-heaver went down the road on top of a motor truck, carolling hoarsely at the summer morning. CHAPTER By F Scott Fitzgerald Sun Letting Heat Life Active

You know, you're a little complicated after all." "Oh no," she assured him hastily. "No, I'm not really - I'm just a - I'm just a whole lot of different simple people. By F Scott Fitzgerald Complicated Hastily People Assured Lot

After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here. By F Scott Fitzgerald American Places Lunch Overwhelmed Sudden

For years afterward 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 cold 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. Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes. By F Scott Fitzgerald Lost Amory Eleanor Heart Years

One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great burden of glory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with Amory and Eleanor, dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal beauty and curious elfin love moods. Then they turned out of the moonlight into the trellised darkness of a vine-hung pagoda, where there were scents so plaintive as to be nearly musical. By F Scott Fitzgerald Eleanor Amory Dim Shapes Expressing

You're not in love with me. You never wanted to marry me, did you?' 'It was the twilight,' he said wonderingly. By F Scott Fitzgerald Love Twilight Wonderingly Wanted Marry

The pastthe wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember. By F Scott Fitzgerald Hill San Juan Hildegarde Button

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. By F Scott Fitzgerald Slacken Thirty Twenties Actual Momentum

The decision as to when to quit, as to when one is merely floundering around and causing other people trouble, has to be made frequently in a lifetime. In youth we are taught the rather simple rule never to quit, because we are presumably following programmes made by people wiser than ourselves. My own conclusion is that when one has embarked on a course that grows increasingly doubtful and one feels the vital forces beginning to be used up, it is best to ask advice if decent advice is in range... By F Scott Fitzgerald Quit People Made Trouble Lifetime

Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence, but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity. By F Scott Fitzgerald Eighteen Adolescence Clarity Thirtyfour Rising

The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights. By F Scott Fitzgerald Platform Giving Universe Nourished Food

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. By F Scott Fitzgerald Wife Suppose Latest Thing Sit

This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the 'creative temperament' - it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No - Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what By F Scott Fitzgerald Creative Temperament Hope Responsiveness Flabby

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction - Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. By F Scott Fitzgerald Tolerance Limit Gatsby Boasting Admission

After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby's party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world. By F Scott Fitzgerald Gatsby World Casualness Party Romantic

They're a rotten crowd', I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together. By F Scott Fitzgerald Crowd Lawn Rotten Shouted Worth

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face. By F Scott Fitzgerald Gatsby Tom Buchanan Girl Unlike

Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night. "God sees everything," repeated Wilson. By F Scott Fitzgerald Michaelis Eckleburg Doctor Standing Emerged

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. By F Scott Fitzgerald Stars Blue Gardens Men Girls

One emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture. By F Scott Fitzgerald Picture Emotion Crept Face Objects

Something in his leisurely move- ments and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to deter- mine what share was his of our local heavens. By F Scott Fitzgerald Gatsby Move Ments Deter Mine

My own rule is to let everything alone. By F Scott Fitzgerald Rule

My hair-- bob it! By F Scott Fitzgerald Hair Bob

Take off that darn fur coat! ... Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows. By F Scott Fitzgerald Coat Darn Fur Windows Open

I found something! Couragejust that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always. By F Scott Fitzgerald Found Couragejust Courage Rule Life

The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed in strange new ways ... By F Scott Fitzgerald York Upstairs Drive Colours Swimmers

Jelly-bean is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular- - I am idling, I have idled, I will idle By F Scott Fitzgerald Confederacy Idle Jellybean Singular Idling

He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret. By F Scott Fitzgerald York Happiness Found Remembering Summer

Back at two o'clock in the Roi George corridor the beauty of Nicole had been the beauty of Rosemary as the beauty of Leonardo's girl was to that of the girl of an illustrator. Dick moved on through the rain, demoniac and frightened, the passions of many men inside him and nothing simple that he could see. By F Scott Fitzgerald Beauty Girl Roi George Nicole

The present was the thingwork to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life By F Scott Fitzgerald Love Present Thingwork Afterward Closely

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body. By F Scott Fitzgerald Baker Jordan Clever Shrewd Men

It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside his bed in the hotel tolling frantically, and remembered that he had left word to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily, his clothes in a pile by his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast in silence, and then sauntered out to get some air. Amory's mind was working slowly, trying to assimilate what had happened and separate from the chaotic imagery that stacked his memory the bare shreds of truth. If the morning had been cold and gray he could have grasped the reins of the past in an instant, but it was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in May, when the air of Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine. How much or how little Sloane remembered Amory did not care to know; he apparently had none of the nervous tension that was gripping Amory and forcing his mind back and forth like a shrieking saw. By F Scott Fitzgerald Bed Amory Frantically Eleven Late

In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year ... 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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Longest Year Day Watch Miss

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization. By F Scott Fitzgerald Flushed Gibberish Civilization Impassioned Standing

Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future - so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic. By F Scott Fitzgerald Routine Landscape Softening Tolerable Twilight

I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations -- with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country -- contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness -- hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day. By F Scott Fitzgerald Liking Things Long Time People

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 worldthey preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him. By F Scott Fitzgerald American Women Lay Man Point

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Intermittently Subconscious Mind Caught Gist

Later in the afternoon the sun went down with a riotous swirl of gold and varying blues and scarlets, and left the dry, rustling night of Western summer. Dexter watched from the veranda of the Golf Club, watched the even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver molasses under the harvest-moon. Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet. Dexter put on his bathing-suit and swam out to the farthest raft, where he stretched dripping on the wet canvas of the springboard. There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the songs of last summer and of summers before that - songs from "Chin-Chin" and "The Count of Luxemburg" and "The Chocolate Soldier" - and because the sound of a piano over a stretch of water had always seemed beautiful to Dexter he lay perfectly quiet and listened. By F Scott Fitzgerald Western Dexter Scarlets Dry Rustling

She was one of those people who are famous beyond their actual achievement. By F Scott Fitzgerald Achievement People Famous Actual

Had they nothing else to say to each other? Yet their eyes were full of more serious statements; and while they sought for commonplace sentences, they each felt the same languor. It was like a murmur of the soul, profound and continuous, dominating that of the voices. Surprised at this unexpected sweetness, it did not occur to them to discuss the sensation or discover the cause. Future happiness, like tropical shores, projects over the vastness that precedes it, its innate indolence, and wafts a scented breeze that intoxicates and dispels any anxiety about the unseen horizon. By F Scott Fitzgerald Statements Sentences Languor Eyes Full

What do you think of that? It's stopped raining."I'm glad Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy. By F Scott Fitzgerald Jay Raining Throat Full Aching

Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.'He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly. By F Scott Fitzgerald Laughed Anxious Loved Cinderella Beg

Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well. By F Scott Fitzgerald Forties Oclock Taxicabs Bound District

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk. By F Scott Fitzgerald Act Mississippi Comment Talk Remember

Trying what?" cried Maury fiercely. "Trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge toward truth? Sitting day after day supine in a rigid chair and infinitely removed from life staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate, definitely and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable? Trying to take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit to paper or canvas? By F Scott Fitzgerald Maury Cried Fiercely Life Day

My courage is faithfaith in the eternal resilience of methat joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes widenot necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite oftenand the female hell is deadlier than the male. By F Scott Fitzgerald Back Spontaneity Courage Faithfaith Eternal

Courage to me means ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life-not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things ... My courage is faith-faith in the eternal resilience of me-that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does, I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide By F Scott Fitzgerald Overriding Living Ploughing Dull Gray

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Amory Moon Back Talked Haltingly

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside. By F Scott Fitzgerald God Inside People Wear Heart

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Daisy Fault Illusion Moments Afternoon

Communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile By F Scott Fitzgerald Communicative Reserved Understood Meant Great

Most of us are content to exist and breed and fight for the right to do both, and the dominant idea, the foredoomed attest to control one's destiny, is reserved for the fortunate or unfortunate few. By F Scott Fitzgerald Idea Destiny Content Exist Breed

No, no, it's not me, it's them - that old time that I've tried to have live in me. These were just men, unimportant evidently or they wouldn't have been 'unknown'; but they died for the most beautiful thing in the world - the dead South. You see," she continued, her voice still husky, her eyes glistening with tears, "people have these dreams they fasten onto things, and I've always grown up with that dream. It was so easy because it was all dead and there weren't any disillusions comin' to me. I've tried in a way to live up to those past standards of noblesse oblige - there's just the last remnants of it, you know, like the roses of an old garden dying all round us - streaks of strange courtliness and chivalry in some of these boys an' stories I used to hear from a Confederate soldier who lived next door, and a few old darkies. Oh, Harry, there was something, there was something! I couldn't ever make you understand but it was there. By F Scott Fitzgerald Time South Live Dead Unknown

In the square, as they came out, a suspended mass of gasoline exhaust cooked slowly in the July sun. It was a terrible thing - unlike pure heat it held no promise of rural escape by suggested only roads choked with the same four asthma. By F Scott Fitzgerald July Square Sun Suspended Mass

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired. By F Scott Fitzgerald Pursued Pursuing Tired Busy

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself. By F Scott Fitzgerald Pleasure Remembered Hours Afternoon Happy

If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don't like this kiss-and-forget.''But I don't want to argue. I think it's wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can't it'll be time to argue. By F Scott Fitzgerald Argue Hurt Feelings Discuss Forget

He considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. By F Scott Fitzgerald Passing Nebulous Indeterminate Immortality Considered

A lot of young girls together is a romantic secret thing like the first sight of wild ducks at dawn. By F Scott Fitzgerald Dawn Lot Young Girls Romantic

From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound - something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness - and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more. By F Scott Fitzgerald Sound Persistently City Ball Calling

There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water.It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete. By F Scott Fitzgerald Faint Barely Perceptible Movement Water

The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the treas and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. By F Scott Fitzgerald Full Leaving Loud Bright Night

There!" she said, as she spread the tablecloth and put the sandwiches in a neat pile upon it. "Don't they look tempting? I always think that food tastes better outdoors."With that remark," remarked Kismine, "Jasmine enters the Middle class. By F Scott Fitzgerald Spread Tablecloth Put Sandwiches Neat

All through the crowd were men in uniform, sailors from the great fleet anchored in the Hudson, soldiers with divisional insignia from Massachusetts to California, wanting fearfully to be noticed, and finding the great city thoroughly fed up with soldiers unless they were nicely massed into pretty formations and uncomfortable under the weight of a pack and rifle. Through this medley Dean and Gordon wandered; the former interested, made alert by the display of humanity at its frothiest and gaudiest; the latter reminded of how often he had been one of the crown, tired, casually fed, overworked, and dissipated. To Dean the struggle was significant, young, cheerful; to Gordon it was dismal, meaningless, endless. By F Scott Fitzgerald Great Soldiers Hudson California Massachusetts

But to be included in Dick Diver's world for a while was a remarkable experience: people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years. He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world. So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all- inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done. By F Scott Fitzgerald Dick Diver Experience People Recognizing

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. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about ... like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. By F Scott Fitzgerald Paid World True Felt Lost

No girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it's every girl for herself. By F Scott Fitzgerald Visitor Girl Permanently Bolster Lameduck

In April war was declared with Germany. Wilson and his cabinet - a cabinet that in its lack of distinction was strangely reminiscent of the twelve apostles - let loose the carefully starved dogs of war, and the press began to whoop hysterically against the sinister morals, sinister philosophy, and sinister music produced by the Teutonic temperament. Those who fancied themselves particularly broad-minded made the exquisite distinction that it was only the German Government which aroused them to hysteria; the rest were worked up to a condition of retching indecency. Any song which contained the word "mother" and the word "kaiser" was assured of a tremendous success. At last every one had something to talk about - and almost every one fully enjoyed it, as though they had been cast for parts in a sombre and romantic play. By F Scott Fitzgerald Germany April Sinister War Declared

Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart. By F Scott Fitzgerald True Canal Grand Ease Depths

Her fine high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet and shining, the colour of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her. By F Scott Fitzgerald Hair Bordering Shield Burst Gold

"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now-isn't that enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly. "I did love him once-but I loved you too."Gatsby's eyes opened and closed."You loved me too?" he repeated."Even that's a lie," said Tom savagely. "She didn't know you were alive. Why-there're things between Daisy and me that you'll never know, things that neither of us can ever forget." By F Scott Fitzgerald Gatsby Cried Love Loved Things

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken ... By F Scott Fitzgerald Generation Gods Shouting Cries Learning

Then it was something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something - most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning - and By F Scott Fitzgerald Love Curiosity Eventually Beginning Felt

A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber holiday. As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry. By F Scott Fitzgerald Carriages Blooms Friends Passed Dead

For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished."Long ago," he said, "long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more. By F Scott Fitzgerald Thing Care Face Long Years

In a few days I'll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod-always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults-rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life. By F Scott Fitzgerald Tears Lived Score Vale Days

No personality as strong as Zelda's could go without getting criticisms and as you say she is not above reproach. I've always known that. Any girl who gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has "kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more," cannot be considered beyond reproach even if above it. But Isabelle I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and it's these things I'd believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all that she should be.But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything. You're still a Catholic but Zelda's the only God I have left now. By F Scott Fitzgerald Zelda Isabelle Personality Strong Criticisms

Rosemary bubbled with delight at the trunks. Her naivete responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world's bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at. By F Scott Fitzgerald Rosemary Trunks Unaware Bubbled Delight

He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized. By F Scott Fitzgerald Dehumanized Terrible Longer

After slipping on a negligee and making herself comfortable on the lounge, she became conscious that she was miserable and that the tears were rolling down her cheeks. She wondered if they were the tears of self-pity, and tried resolutely not to cry, but this existence without hope, without happiness, oppressed her, and she kept shaking her head from side to side, her mouth drawn down tremulously in the corners, as though she were denying the assertion made by some one, somewhere. She did not know that this gesture of hers was years older than history, that, for a hundred generations of men, intolerable and persistent grief has offered that gesture, of denial, of protest, of bewilderment, to something more profound, more powerful than the God made in the image of man, and before which that God, did he exist, would be equally impotent. It is a truth set at the heart of tragedy that this force never explains, never answers - this force intangible as air, more definite than death. By F Scott Fitzgerald Tears Lounge Cheeks God Slipping

First was a lone cyclist, in a red jersey, toiling intent and confident out of the westering sun, passing to the melody of a high chattering cheer. Then three together in a harlequinade of faded colour, legs caked yellow with dust and sweat, faces expressionless, eyes heavy and endlessly tired.Tommy faced Dick, saying: 'I think Nicole wants a divorce - I suppose you'll make no obstacles?'A troupe of fifty more swarmed after the first bicycle racers, strung out over two hundred yards; a few were smiling and self-conscious, a few obviously exhausted, most of them indifferent and weary. A retinue of small boys passed, a few defiant stragglers, a light truck carried the victims of accident and defeat. By F Scott Fitzgerald Cyclist Jersey Toiling Sun Passing

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Rosalind Men Enters Afraid Utterly

You don't know what a trial it is to be - like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me. By F Scott Fitzgerald Trial Face Steel Street Men

If you believe in anything very stronglyincluding yourselfand if you go after that thing alone, you end up in jail, in heaven, in the headlines, or in the largest house on the block, according to what you started after. If you don't believe in anything very stronglyincluding yourselfyou go along, and enough money is made out of you to buy an automobile for some other fellow's son, and you marry if you've got time, and if you do you have a lot of children, whether you have time or not, and finally you get tired and you die. If you're in the second of these two classes you have the most fun before you're twenty-five. If you're in the first, you have it afterward ... if you're in the first class you'll frequently be called a darn foolor worse. By F Scott Fitzgerald Stronglyincluding Jail Heaven Headlines Block

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Riotous Joyful Youth Vanished Contrast

oh, why am I a girl? Why am I not a stupid - ? Look at you; you're stupider than I am, not much, but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified - and here am I with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If I were born a hundred years from now, well and good, but now what's in store for me - I have to marry, that goes without saying. Who? I'm too bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention. By F Scott Fitzgerald Lope Girl Girls Stupid Sentiment

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men. By F Scott Fitzgerald Gatsby Book Scorn Man Exempt

Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy or Gatsby anymore, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal skepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. By F Scott Fitzgerald Hard Daisy Gatsby Suddenly Anymore

In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon - for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. By F Scott Fitzgerald Judgements Bores Consequence Inclined Reserve

Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. By F Scott Fitzgerald Isabelle Half Eyes Wide Starry

It's only when the settlement work has gone on for months that one realizes how bad things are. As our secretary said to me, your finger-nails never seem dirty until you wash your hands. By F Scott Fitzgerald Settlement Work Months Realizes Bad

As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. 'You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man.' She narrowed her eyes and shivered. By F Scott Fitzgerald Enthusiasm Credulity Switched Back Leaned

Writing is eternal, For therein the dead heart liveth, the clay-cold tongue is eloquent, And the quick eye of the reader is cleared by the reed of the scribe. As a fossil in the rock, or a coin in the mortar of a ruin, So the symbolled thoughts tell of a departed soul: The plastic hand hath its witness in a statue, and exactitude of vision in a picture, And so, the mind, that was among us, in its writings is embalmed. By F Scott Fitzgerald Eternal Liveth Eloquent Scribe Dead

The notion originated with Daisy's suggestion that we hire five bath-rooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as "a place to have a mint julep." Each of us said over and over that it was a "crazy idea." - we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny ... By F Scott Fitzgerald Daisy Baths Julep Notion Originated

They stood an uncomfortable little group weighted down by Abe's gigantic presence: he lay athwart them like the wreck of a galleon, dominating with his presence his own weakness and self-indulgence, his narrowness and bitterness. All of them were conscious of the solemn dignity that flowed from him, of his achievement, fragmentary, suggestive and surpassed. But they were frightened at his surviving will, once a will to love, now become a will to die. By F Scott Fitzgerald Presence Abe Galleon Dominating Selfindulgence

I was haunted always by my other life-my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama-would it come and what would it say?-my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. While my friends were launching decently into life I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream ... I was a failure-mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home. By F Scott Fitzgerald Bronx Alabamawould Subway Suits Poverty

The voice fell low, sank into her breast and stretched the tight bodice over her heart as she came up close. He felt the young lips, her body sighing in relief against the arm growing stronger to hold her. There were now no more plans than if Dick had arbitrarily made some indissoluble mixture, with atoms joined and inseparable; you could throw it all out but never again could they fit back into atomic scale. As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes. By F Scott Fitzgerald Low Sank Close Voice Fell

What is a gentleman, anyway?He's a man who prefers the first edition of a book to the last edition of a newspaper. By F Scott Fitzgerald Edition Gentleman Newspaper Man Prefers

MAURY: What is a gentleman, anyway? ANTHONY: A man who never has pins under his coat lapel. MAURY: Nonsense! A man's social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich. DICK: He's a man who prefers the first edition of a book to the last edition of a newspaper. RACHAEL: A man who never gives an impersonation of a dope-fiend. MAURY: An American who can fool an English butler into thinking he's one. MURIEL: A man who comes from a good family and went to Yale or Harvard or Princeton, and has money and dances well, and all that. MAURY: At last - the perfect definition! Cardinal Newman's is now a back number. By F Scott Fitzgerald Maury Man Gentleman Anthony Nonsense

He had been living in a down-town Y.M.C.A., but when he quit the task of making sow-ear purses out of sows' ears, he moved up-town and went to work immediately as a reporter for The Sun. He kept at this for a year, doing desultory writing on the side, with little success, and then one day an infelicitous incident peremptorily closed his newspaper career. On a February afternoon he was assigned to report a parade of Squadron A. Snow threatening, he went to sleep instead before a hot fire, and when he woke up did a smooth column about the muffled beats of the horses' hoofs in the snow ... This he handed in. Next morning a marked copy of the paper was sent down to the City Editor with a scrawled note: "Fire the man who wrote this." It seemed that Squadron A had also seen the snow threatening - had postponed the parade until another day. A week later he had begun "The Demon Lover." ... In By F Scott Fitzgerald Sun Snow Downtown Ears Squadron

She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper. By F Scott Fitzgerald Wait Operation Man Air Important

He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It facedor seemed to facethe whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. By F Scott Fitzgerald Understandingly Smiled Understandinglymuch Eternal Understood

Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as inevitably his the pageantry and carnival of rich dusk and dim streets ... it seemed that he had closed the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of life. Everywhere these countless lights, this promise of a night of streets and singing he moved in a half-dream through the crowd as if expecting to meet Rosalind hurrying toward him with eager feet from every corner ... 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. Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds upon the summer air. By F Scott Fitzgerald Amory Wandered Slowly Avenue Thought

Maybe we'll have more fun this summer but this particular fun is over. I want it to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally that's why I gave this party. By F Scott Fitzgerald Fun Summer Party Die Violently

I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational. By F Scott Fitzgerald Irrational Hope Impression Kissing Intrinsically

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Family Things Quarrels Bitter Rules

And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone. By F Scott Fitzgerald Taught Sunbeam Inconsequential Desire Cheats

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 ... By F Scott Fitzgerald Daisy Past Talked Lot Gathered

Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary's cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret wamrth within. By F Scott Fitzgerald Rosemary Misery Desire Desperation Person

Oh, sleep that dreams, and dream that never tires, press from the petals of the lotus flower something of this to keep, the essence of an hour. By F Scott Fitzgerald Sleep Tires Press Hour Petals

They were together constantly, for lunch, for dinner, and nearly every evening - always in a sort of breathless hush, as if they feared that any minute the spell would break and drop them out of this paradise of rose and flame. But the spell became a trance, seemed to increase from day to day; they began to talk of marrying in July - in June. All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified - their senses of humor crawled into corners to sleep; their former love-affairs seemed faintly laughable and scarcely regretted juvenalia. For By F Scott Fitzgerald Spell Constantly Lunch Dinner Evening

Give me some bacon and eggs and coffee, please." The By F Scott Fitzgerald Give Coffee Bacon Eggs

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work-the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside-the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within-that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick-the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. By F Scott Fitzgerald Blows Weakness Life Process Breaking

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora's box.Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York. By F Scott Fitzgerald Building Empire State City Ruins

The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. By F Scott Fitzgerald House Windows Ajar Gleaming Fresh

With every detail imagined, with even envy for the pair's community of misfortune in the vestibule, Dick felt a change taking place within him. Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, deception. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary's cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from the outside, the inviolable secret warmth within. By F Scott Fitzgerald Dick Rosemary Imagined Vestibule Detail

I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to 'succeed'-and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills-domestic, professional and personal-then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last. By F Scott Fitzgerald Sense Struggle Succeed Future Hold

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Sigh Window Resigned Happiness Eyelid

I've told you many times that the first thing I decide is the kind of story I want. ( ... ) This is not the kind of story I want. The story we bought had shine and glow - it was a happy story. This is all full of doubt and hesitation. The hero and heroine stop loving each other over trifles - then they start up again over trifles. After the first sequence you don't care if she never sees him again or he her. By F Scott Fitzgerald Story Kind Told Times Thing

I like these streets ... I always feel as though it's a performance being staged for me; as though the second I've passed they'll all stop leaping and laughing and, instead grow very sad, remembering how poor they are, and retreat with bowed heads into their houses. You often get that effect abroad By F Scott Fitzgerald Streets Sad Remembering Houses Abroad

He had never met a girl like this before - she would never seem quite the same again. He didn't at all feel like a character in a play, the appropriate feeling in an unconventional situation - instead, he had a sense of coming home. By F Scott Fitzgerald Met Girl Play Situation Home

As he sat on the side of the bed, he felt the room, the house and the night as empty. In the next room Nicole muttered something in her sleep. For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday, with the added poignance of her perishable beauty. By F Scott Fitzgerald Nicole Room Bed Empty Sat

This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl. By F Scott Fitzgerald Beauty Astonishing Astounding Dream Girl

Afterward their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped from their souls never to meet. 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? She will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads this she will say: And Amory will have no other adventure like me. By F Scott Fitzgerald Afterward Played Meet Amory Ghosts

Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon. By F Scott Fitzgerald Times Unsuccessfully Hold Fine Nights

You've a place in my heart no one else ever could have, but tied down here I'd get restless. I'd feel I was - wastin' myself. There's two sides to me, you see. There's the sleepy old side you love; an' there's a sort of energy - the feelin' that makes me do wild things. That's the part of me that may be useful somewhere, that'll last when I'm not beautiful any more." She By F Scott Fitzgerald Restless Place Heart Tied Wastin

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Amory Poet Finished Things Women

I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation-with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game. By F Scott Fitzgerald Mind Radicals Simply State Product

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall ... By F Scott Fitzgerald House French Windows Space Fragilely

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete. By F Scott Fitzgerald Daisy Faster Heart Beat White

American men," said Nancy gravely, "don't know how to drink.""What?" Jim was startled."In fact," she went on carelessly, "they don't know how to do anything very well. The one thing I regret in my life is that I wasn't born in England.""In England?""Yes. It's the one regret of my life that I wasn't. By F Scott Fitzgerald Nancy American Men Gravely Drink

I don't care about truth. I want some happiness. By F Scott Fitzgerald Truth Care Happiness

Afterwards, he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again. By F Scott Fitzgerald Sat Happy Past Live Contemporary

He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated a surrender with equanimity. Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him - like an actor kissed in a picture. By F Scott Fitzgerald Equanimity Desired Virginal Emotions Contemplated

Already he felt her absence from these skies: on the beach he could only remember the sun-torn flesh of her shoulder; at Tarmes he crushed out her footprints as he crossed the garden; and now the orchestra launching into the Nice Carnival Song, an echo of last year's vanished gaieties, started the little dance that went on all about her. In a hundred hours she had come to possess all the world's dark magic; the blinding belladonna, the caffein converting physical into nervous energy, the mandragora that imposes harmony. By F Scott Fitzgerald Song Tarmes Nice Carnival Skies

I could settle down if women were different," he said. "If I didn't understand so much about them, if women didn't spoil you for other women, if they had only a little pride. If I could go to sleep for a while and wake up into a home that was really mine - why, that's what I'm made for, Paula, that's what women have seen in me and liked in me. It's only that I can't get through the preliminaries any more. By F Scott Fitzgerald Women Settle Paula Pride Understand

You'll notice a blond person is expected to talk. If a blond girl doesn't talk we call her a 'doll'; if a light-haired man is silent he's considered stupid. Yet the world is full of 'dark silent men' and 'languorous brunettes' who haven't a brain in their heads, but somehow are never accused of the dearth. By F Scott Fitzgerald Blond Talk Notice Person Expected

I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life. By F Scott Fitzgerald Life Lie Sweetly Rest

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher - a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over. By F Scott Fitzgerald Hard Pitifully Leaders People Roosevelt

There are certain things which are human nature," he asserted with an owl-like look, "which always have been and always will be, which can't be changed." Amory looked from the small man to the big man helplessly. "Listen to that! That's what makes me discouraged with progress. Listen to that! I can name offhand over one hundred natural phenomena that have been changed by the will of mana hundred instincts in man that have been wiped out or are now held in check by civilization. What this man here just said has been for thousands of years the last refuge of the associated mutton-heads of the world. It negates the efforts of every scientist, statesman, moralist, reformer, doctor, and philosopher that ever gave his life to humanity's service. It's a flat impeachment of all that's worth while in human nature. Every person over twenty-five years old who makes that statement in cold blood ought to be deprived of the franchise. By F Scott Fitzgerald Man Listen Things Asserted Owllike

One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. By F Scott Fitzgerald Falling Moonlight Autumn Walking Street

And she wanted for a moment to hold and devour him, wanted his mouth, his ears, his coat collar, wanted to surround him and engulf him ... By F Scott Fitzgerald Wanted Mouth Ears Collar Moment

You will admit that if it was not life it was magnificent. By F Scott Fitzgerald Magnificent Admit Life

It's not a bad time, it's not one of the worst times of the day. By F Scott Fitzgerald Day Bad Worst Time Times

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain. By F Scott Fitzgerald Plain Great Social Success Pretty

Happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than By F Scott Fitzgerald East Egg Happened Warm Windy

Gloria was sure she wanted but to read and dream and be fed tomato sandwiches and lemonades by some angelic servant By F Scott Fitzgerald Gloria Servant Wanted Read Dream

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person. By F Scott Fitzgerald Person Abnormal Mind Quick Detect

Collis, unaware that he was without a wedding garment, heralded his arrival with: I reckon I'm latethe beyed has flown. By F Scott Fitzgerald Collis Unaware Garment Heralded Flown

It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people- with the single mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe. By F Scott Fitzgerald People Safe Occurred Man Start

Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive. By F Scott Fitzgerald Wilson York Sister Alive Dumb

Well, if someone is a bad driver and all the other drivers around them are good drivers, then they are safe because all the good drivers will dodge the bad driver so that there is no car crash. But if there is another bad driver, then there can be a crash. By F Scott Fitzgerald Good Bad Crash Driver Drivers

You said a bad driver is only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride. By F Scott Fitzgerald Bad Driver Met Safe Thought

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Blend Footsteps Overtures Unforgettable Faces

The reaction came when he realized the waste and extravagance involved. He somtimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust. By F Scott Fitzgerald Involved Reaction Realized Waste Extravagance

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Affects Face Blind Block Dollar

And a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove By F Scott Fitzgerald Finnish Woman Stove Made Bed

Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air. By F Scott Fitzgerald Daisy Husky Rhythmic Whisper Bringing

Something bright and alien flashed across the sky ... and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of their old best dreams. Maybe there was a way out by flying, maybe our restless blood could find frontiers in the illimitable air. But by that time we were all pretty well committed; and the Jazz Age continued; we would all have one more. By F Scott Fitzgerald Sky Dreams Bright Alien Flashed

Who is he anyhow, an actor?""No.""A dentist?"" ... No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added cooly: "He's the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919.""Fixed the World Series?" I repeated.The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million peoplewith the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe."How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute."He just saw the opportunity.""Why isn't he in jail?""They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man. By F Scott Fitzgerald World Series Fixed Actor Dentist

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Princeton Amory Afternoons Pools Willow

There's a writer for you," he said. "Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing." [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers - because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer - still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying - only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers. By F Scott Fitzgerald Writer Writers People Narrator Time

He was enough older than Nicole to take pleasure in her youthful vanities and delights, the way she paused fractionally in front of the hall mirror on leaving the restaurant, so that the incorruptible quicksilver could give her back to herself. He delighted in her stretching out her hands to new octaves now that she found herself beautiful and rich. He tried honestly to divorce her from any obsession that he had stitched her together - glad to see her build up happiness and confidence apart from him; the difficulty was that, eventually, Nicole brought everything to his feet, gifts of sacrificial ambrosia, of worshipping myrtle. By F Scott Fitzgerald Nicole Delights Restaurant Older Pleasure

I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness. Indeed, I accomplished the not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it presented itself to me in life - and of being beaten and bewildered just the same. By F Scott Fitzgerald Happiness Life Reached Maturity Impression

He was good looking, "sort of distinguished when he wants to be", had a line, and was properly inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environment led her to desire By F Scott Fitzgerald Sort Line Inconstant Good Distinguished

He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis - these had been his ingredients when he entered St. Regis'. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay to conceal the "Amory plus Beatrice" from the ferreting eyes of a boarding school, so St. Regis' had very painfully drilled Beatrice out of him and begun to lay down new and more conventional planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis' and Amory were unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself changed. Those qualities for which he had suffered: his moodiness, his tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the "St. Regis' Tattler"; it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very vanities that had not long ago been contemptible weaknesses. By F Scott Fitzgerald Amory Beatrice Blaine Regis Minneapolis

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. By F Scott Fitzgerald Angry Half Love Tremendously Turned

I have asked a lot of my emotions-one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now. By F Scott Fitzgerald Stories Asked Lot Emotionsone Hundred

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. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. By F Scott Fitzgerald Men Rich Unprogressive Grasping Acquisitive

Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it! By F Scott Fitzgerald Longest Day Year Miss Wait

I always watch for the longest day in the year and then I miss it. By F Scott Fitzgerald Watch Longest Day Year Miss

Actually that's my secret - I can't even talk about you to anybody because I don't want any more people to know how wonderful you are. By F Scott Fitzgerald Secret Talk People Wonderful

There is a moment - Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word - something that makes it worth while. By F Scott Fitzgerald Moment Kiss Word Whispered Makes

He told me all the things he liked to THINK he thought in the misty past. By F Scott Fitzgerald Past Told Things Thought Misty

It's not that I have any moral compunctions about work ... but grampa may die to-morrow and he may live for ten years. Meanwhile we're living above our income and all we've got to show for it is a farmer's car and a few clothes. We keep an apartment that we've only lived in three months and a little old house way off in nowhere. We're frequently bored and yet we won't make any effort to know any one except the same crowd who drift around California all summer wearing sport clothes and waiting for their families to die. By F Scott Fitzgerald Work Moral Compunctions Die Clothes

Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal--with an effort he choked back the impulse. "You're just theromantic age," she continued--"fifty. Twenty-five is too wordly-wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork;forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is--oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty isthe mellow age. I love fifty. By F Scott Fitzgerald Benjamin Proposal Impulse Age Fifty

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man , more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. 'How do you get to West Egg village?' he asked helplessly. I told him. Ans as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He has casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. By F Scott Fitzgerald Man Stopped Road Day Morning

Think how you love me,' she whispered. 'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.'You'll always be like this to me.'Oh no; but promise me you'll remember.' Her tears were falling. 'I'll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight. By F Scott Fitzgerald Love Whispered Remember Remember Promise

Already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. By F Scott Fitzgerald Wanderers Confident Stable Sharp Joyous

The voluptuous chords of the wedding march done in blasphemous syncopation issued in a delirious blend from the trombones and saxophones--and By F Scott Fitzgerald Saxophones Voluptuous Chords Wedding March

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different. By F Scott Fitzgerald Rich Deep Early Makes Hard

All life was weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman's hand on a tired forehead. Down in Georgia there is a feeling - perhaps inarticulate - that this is the greatest wisdom of the South - so after a while the Jelly-bean turned into a poolhall on Jackson Street where he was sure to find a congenial crowd who would make all the old jokes - the ones he knew. By F Scott Fitzgerald Weather Forehead Life Waiting Hot

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Significance Sheath Held Soul Assumed

It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together. By F Scott Fitzgerald Love Marriage Caught Charming Irresistible

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk. By F Scott Fitzgerald Face Listened Faded Regret Dusk

I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands. By F Scott Fitzgerald York Overripe Love Summer Afternoons

We'll all be failures?""Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of - of ineffectual and sad, and - oh, how can I tell you? By F Scott Fitzgerald Failures Sad Money Sort Ineffectual

That was always my experience-a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton ... However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works. By F Scott Fitzgerald Boy Poor Princeton Rich Town

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 thirdbefore long the best lines cancel outand the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the picture have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true. By F Scott Fitzgerald Picture Humor Bright Finished Product

She was a brave, hopeful woman and she was following her husband somewhere, changing herself to this kind of person or that, without being able to lead him a step out of his path, and sometimes realizing with discouragement how deep in him the guarded secret of her direction lay. And yet an air of luck clung about her, as if she were a token... By F Scott Fitzgerald Brave Hopeful Changing Path Lay

Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power-at its worst the Napoleonic delusion. By F Scott Fitzgerald Napoleonic Premature Delusion Success Mystical

Open the whisky, Tom,' she ordered, 'and I'll make you a mint julep. Then you won't seem so stupid to yourself ... Look at the mint! By F Scott Fitzgerald Tom Open Whisky Ordered Julep

He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful - then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known. By F Scott Fitzgerald Minutes Distance Watched Red Stirred

But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. By F Scott Fitzgerald Daisy Jordan Unlike Age Wise

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Heard Feet Struggle Distance Sad

A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths. By F Scott Fitzgerald Blew Land Sudden Gust Rain

As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership. By F Scott Fitzgerald Made Foot Home Hand Head

One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil By F Scott Fitzgerald Von Hindenburg Devil Time Killed

For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. By F Scott Fitzgerald Daisy Pleasant Cheerful Year Summing

It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows- it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of sky-scrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray heaven. By F Scott Fitzgerald York Threatening World Indulge Dark

That we shall use every discovery of science in the preservation of our children's health goes without saying; but we shall do more than this - we shall give them a free start, not loading them up with our own ideas and experiences, nor advising them to live according to our lights. We were burned in the fire here and there, but - who knows? - fire may not burn our children, and if we warn them away from it they may end by never growing warm. We will not even inflict our cynicism on them as the sentimentality of our fathers was inflicted on us. The most we will do is urge a little doubt, asking that the doubt be exercised on our ideas as well as on all the mortal things in this world. By F Scott Fitzgerald Start Experiences Lights Children Discovery

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Deserted Jones Kissed Kisses Engaged

The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood. By F Scott Fitzgerald Purpose Mood Work Fiction Appeal

To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless ratiocination of subject - of endless trying to dig out the essential truth, the essential justice. As a first premise you have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without the conscience, you are just one of many thousands of journalists. By F Scott Fitzgerald Essential Endless Subject Truth Justice

In his moments of insecurity he was haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after all, significant. By F Scott Fitzgerald Significant Moments Insecurity Haunted Suggestion

In a moment he would call Tana and they would pour into themselves a gay and delicate poison which would restore them momentarily to the pleasurable excitement of childhood, when every face in a crowd had carried its suggestion of splendid and significant transactions taking place somewhere to some magnificent and illimitable purpose...Life was no more than this summer afternoon; a faint wind stirring the lace collar of Gloria's dress, the slow baking drowsiness of the veranda...Intolerably unmoved they all seemed, removed from any romantic imminency of action. Even Gloria's beauty needed wild emotions, needed poignancy, needed death... By F Scott Fitzgerald Life Intolerably Tana Gloria Childhood

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Personality Sickness Things Physical Matter

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Late Basing Water Years Dreamed

I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn't want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters. By F Scott Fitzgerald Strong Sudden Instinct People Average

you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified - and here am I with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If I were born a hundred years from now, well and good, but now what's in store for me - I have to marry, that goes without saying. By F Scott Fitzgerald Lope Sentiment Justified Matrimony Bored

Working-girls, in pairs and groups and swarms, loitered by these windows, choosing their future boudoirs from some resplendent display which included even a man's silk pajamas laid domestically across the bed. They stood in front of the jewelry stores and picked out their engagement rings, and their wedding rings and their platinum wrist watches, and then drifted on to inspect the feather fans and opera cloaks; meanwhile digesting the sandwiches and Sundaes they had eaten for lunch. By F Scott Fitzgerald Workinggirls Swarms Loitered Windows Choosing

Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair? - By F Scott Fitzgerald Affair Kissing Generally Considered Joyful

Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you. By F Scott Fitzgerald Hard Sit Close Kiss

And he suddenly realized the meaning of the word 'dissipate' to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion. By F Scott Fitzgerald Dissipate Word Air Suddenly Realized

It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of the windows downstairs, filling the house with gray-turning, gold-turning light. The Shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a slow, pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool, lovely day. By F Scott Fitzgerald Long Island Downstairs Filling Grayturning

Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m. By F Scott Fitzgerald Personality Worthless Morning Moon Feel

Marriage is an error of youth By F Scott Fitzgerald Marriage Youth Error

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Crawford Joan Flapper Clubs Gowned

He stretched out his arms towards the dark water in a curious way, and,far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling involuntarily I glanced seaward - and distinguishing nothing except a single green light, minute and faraway, that might have been the end of a dock. By F Scott Fitzgerald Andfar Seaward Light Minute Faraway

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. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing them: "Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free. By F Scott Fitzgerald Grey Sunstrained Ahead Relations Eyes

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen. By F Scott Fitzgerald Truth Authors Repeat Great Moving

A love affair is like a short storyit has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes. By F Scott Fitzgerald End Beginning Middle Love Affair

It's just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they're never coming again, and I'm not really getting all I could out of them. By F Scott Fitzgerald Nights Feel Sad Wonderful Sort

Frequently I had feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering in the horizon. By F Scott Fitzgerald Preoccupation Frequently Sleep Horizon Feigned

A rigour passed over him,blood rose into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a steady thumping in his ears. It was first love. By F Scott Fitzgerald Cheeks Forehead Ears Rigour Passed

A writer like me must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothing-can-happen-to me, nothing-can-touch-me ... I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip. By F Scott Fitzgerald Utter Confidence Star Writer Faith

We have great faith, though yours at present is uncrystallized; we have a terrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy and, above all, a childlike simplicity that keeps us from ever being really malicious. By F Scott Fitzgerald Faith Uncrystallized Malicious Great Present

Why? But I want to know just why it's impossible for an American to be gracefully idle" - his words gathered conviction - "it astonishes me. It - it - I don't understand why people think that every young man ought to go down-town and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of his life at dull, unimaginative work, certainly not altruistic work. By F Scott Fitzgerald Work American Idle Conviction Impossible

Why shouldn't he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase 'I love you By F Scott Fitzgerald Phrase Life Progression Recession Love

You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell. By F Scott Fitzgerald Heart Reactions Lightly Dinner Sell

Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming. By F Scott Fitzgerald Life Sea Swimming Rose Island

The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he's succeeded, and the failure because he's failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father's good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father's mistakes. By F Scott Fitzgerald Success Failure View Succeeded Failed

It is the custom to look back on ourselves of the boom days with a disapproval that approaches horror ... But it had its virtues, that old boom: Life was a great deal larger and gayer for most people, and the stampede to the Spartan virtues in times of war and famine shouldn't make us too dizzy to remember its hilarious glory. By F Scott Fitzgerald Horror Boom Custom Back Days

People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man's duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness. By F Scott Fitzgerald People Convictions Righteousness Talk Courage

It became established among his Harvard intimates that he was in Rome, and those of them who were abroad that year looked him up and discovered with him, on many moonlight excursions, much in the city that was older than the Renaissance or indeed than the republic. Maury Noble, from Philadelphia, for instance, remained two months, and together they realized the peculiar charm of Latin women and had a delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free. Not By F Scott Fitzgerald Rome Harvard Renaissance Excursions Republic

Vich Deelish My heart is in the heart of my son And my life is in his life surely A man can be twice young In the life of his sons only. By F Scott Fitzgerald Deelish Life Vich Heart Surely

Look at that,' she whispered, and then after a moment: 'I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around. By F Scott Fitzgerald Whispered Moment Pink Clouds Put

Every act of life, from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner, became an effort. I hated the night when I couldn't sleep and I hated the day because it went toward night. By F Scott Fitzgerald Life Dinner Effort Hated Act

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. By F Scott Fitzgerald Snow Wisconsin Windows Began Air

I don't much care where I am anymore, nor expect very much from places. By F Scott Fitzgerald Anymore Places Care Expect

Her hair, drawn back off her ears, brushed her shoulders in such a way that the face seemed to have just emerged from it, as if this were the exact moment when she was coming from a wood into clear moonlight. The unknown yielded her up; Dick wished she had no background, that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from which she had come. By F Scott Fitzgerald Hair Drawn Ears Brushed Moonlight

I went in - after making every possible noise in the kitchen, short of pushing over the stove - but I don't believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as if some question had been asked, or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy's face was smeared with tears, and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room. By F Scott Fitzgerald Kitchen Short Stove Sound Making

Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheelhe stared at it for a moment and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky. "It came off," some one explained. He nodded. "At first I din' notice we'd stopped." A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders he remarked in a determined voice: "Wonder'ff tell me where there's a gas'line station?" At least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was, explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical bond. "Back out," he suggested after a moment. "Put her in reverse." "But the WHEEL'S off!" He hesitated. "No harm in trying," he said. By F Scott Fitzgerald Half Sky Fingers Pointed Amputated

I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad! By F Scott Fitzgerald Salad Care Hoes Lettuce Country

It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people. By F Scott Fitzgerald Life Round People Kissing

Never miss a party ... good for the nerveslike celery. By F Scott Fitzgerald Party Miss Good Celery Nerveslike

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me. By F Scott Fitzgerald Champagne Drink Drop Care Kills

Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took to reading and walking as almost his only pursuits. He voluntarily attended graduate lectures in philosophy and biology, and sat in all of them with a rather pathetically intent look in his eyes, as if waiting for something the lecturer would never quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm in his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a point. He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of becoming a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and once when Burne passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly, his mind a thousand miles away, Amory almost choked with the romantic joy of watching him. Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever unable to get a foothold. By F Scott Fitzgerald Farther Amory Burne Drawing World

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. By F Scott Fitzgerald Trees Movies Summer Sunshine Great

Do you think the solitude in which I live has a more amusing decor than any other solitude? Do you think it is any nicer for remembering that were times very late at night when you and I shared our alone-ness? I will take my full share of responsibility for all this tragedy but I cannot spread beyond the limits of my reach and gasp. By F Scott Fitzgerald Solitude Live Amusing Decor Aloneness

I can't exactly describe how I feel but it's not quite right. And it leaves me cold. By F Scott Fitzgerald Describe Feel Cold Leaves

Most of the big shore places were closed now. And there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of the ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away till gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes, A fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. For a transitory, enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent. Face to face, for the last time in history, with something commensurate to its capacity for wonder. By F Scott Fitzgerald Big Shore Places Closed Face

Then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses. By F Scott Fitzgerald Arrival Roses Waiting Roof Moon

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Advertising Racket Business Movies Brokerage

Happiness is the relief after extreme tension By F Scott Fitzgerald Happiness Tension Relief Extreme

You'll find another.' God! Banish the thought. 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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Find God Girl Worth Sir

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation. By F Scott Fitzgerald Butler Wilde Conrad Chesterton Samuel

Faces swirled about him, a kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin- too fat, too lean, yet floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm passionate breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious. By F Scott Fitzgerald Ugly Faces Girls Sin Fat

Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality - he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor. By F Scott Fitzgerald Amory Personality Actor Concrete Vice

She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter - like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination, Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it, and everything all at once seemed gorgeous. By F Scott Fitzgerald Sad Sight Felt Betrayed Presently

Slowly she spread her arms and stood there swan-like, radiating a pride in her young perfection that lit a warm glow in Carlyle's heart. "We're going through the black air with our arms wide," she called, "and our feet straight out behind like a dolphin's tail, and we're going to think we'll never hit the silver down there till suddenly it'll be all warm round us and full of little kissing, caressing waves." 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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Carlyle Arms Warm Slowly Swanlike

That illusion of young romantic love to which women look forever forward and forever back. By F Scott Fitzgerald Back Forever Illusion Young Romantic

Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process. By F Scott Fitzgerald Art Process Found Intensity Happen

It's odd," Amory said to Tom one night when they had grown more amicable on the subject, "that the people who violently disapprove of Burne's radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee class - I mean they're the best-educated men in college - the editors of the papers, like yourself and Ferrenby, the younger professors.... The illiterate athletes like Langueduc think he's getting eccentric, but they just say, 'Good old Burne has got some queer ideas in his head,' and pass on - the Pharisee class - Gee! they ridicule him unmercifully. By F Scott Fitzgerald Pharisee Amory Ferrenby Burne Class

The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style ... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level. By F Scott Fitzgerald Garden Increase Cultivate Poetry Style

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them-with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro's troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances, which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro's warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines. By F Scott Fitzgerald Montenegro Smile Montenegrin Lifted Words

Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than ever on to his Celtic mother. He had tutored occasionally - the idea being that he was to "keep up," at each place "taking up the work where he left off," yet as no tutor ever found the place he left off, his mind was still in very good shape. By F Scott Fitzgerald Celtic Amory Thirteen Slender Mother

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Vanity Spend Life Sparing People

You wouldn't have to do any business with Wolfsheim." Evidently he thought that I was shying away from the "gonnegtion" mentioned at lunch, but I assured him he was wrong. By F Scott Fitzgerald Wolfsheim Gonnegtion Business Evidently Mentioned

There are four types of husbands.The husband who always wants to stay in in the evening, has no vices and works for a salary. Totally undesirable!The atavistic master whose mistress one is, to wait on his pleasure. This sort always considers every pretty woman "shallow," a sort of peacock with arrested development.Next comes the worshiper, the idolaters of his wife and all that is his, to the utter oblivion of everything else. This sort demands an emotional actress for a wife. God! It must be an exertion to be thought righteous!And Anthony - a temporarily passionate lover with wisdom enough to realize when it has flown and that it must fly. And I want to get married to Anthony. By F Scott Fitzgerald Evening Salary Sort Anthony Types

Some people, were born to sit by a river. Some get struck by lightning. Some have an ear for music. Some are artists. Some swim. Some know buttons. Some know Shakespeare. Some are mothers. And some people, dance. By F Scott Fitzgerald River Born Sit People Lightning

Then there came a faraway, booming voice like a low, clear bell. It came from the center of the bowl and down the great sides to the ground and then bounced toward her eagerly. 'You see I am fate,' it shouted, 'and stronger than your puny plans; and I am how-things-turn-out and I am different from your little dreams, and I am the flight of time and the end of beauty and unfulfilled desire; all the accidents and imperceptions and the little minutes that shape the crucial hours are mine. I am the exception that proves no rules, the limits of your control, the condiment in the dish of life. By F Scott Fitzgerald Faraway Booming Low Clear Bell

All the evil hate in the mad heart of February was wrought into the forlorn and icy wind that cut its way cruelly across Central Park and down along Fifth Avenue. By F Scott Fitzgerald Avenue February Central Park Evil

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after allTom 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. By F Scott Fitzgerald West Gatsby Daisy Westerners Jordan

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - 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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Justified Forgive Careless Tom Daisy

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-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 made.... By F Scott Fitzgerald Tom Daisythey People Carelessness Made

You two start on home, Daisy,' said Tom. 'In Mr Gatsby's car.' She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn. 'Go on. He won't annoy you. I think he realises that his presumptuous little flirtation is over. By F Scott Fitzgerald Daisy Tom Home Start Gatsby

Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies. By F Scott Fitzgerald Daisy Tom Stared Movies Peculiarly

If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type. By F Scott Fitzgerald Type Create End Creating Individual

Limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously By F Scott Fitzgerald Limited Anticlimax Excellence Twentyone Afterward

She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself. By F Scott Fitzgerald Soul Incomprehensible Spirit Beauty Body

She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful. By F Scott Fitzgerald Beautiful Magazines Girls Thought Loved

I see you're looking at my cuff buttons. I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now. By F Scott Fitzgerald Buttons Cuff

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Man Sophisticated Environment Exceptional Young

Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten remoteness of the afternoon. By F Scott Fitzgerald Violets Afternoon Eyes Halflight Suggested

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Day Weathers Visions Grey Fleshly

I have a hunch it's a thing that only fails to be basic because it's never had material recognition. The weakness of this profession is its attraction for the man a little crippled and broken. Within the walls of the profession he compensates by tending toward the clinical, the 'practical' - he has won his battle without a struggle.""On the contrary, you are a good man, Franz, because fate selected you for your profession before you were born. You better thank God you had no 'bent' - I got to be a psychiatrist because there was a girl at St. Hilda's in Oxford that went to the same lectures. Maybe I'm getting trite but I don't want to let my current ideas slide away with a few dozen glasses of beer. By F Scott Fitzgerald Profession Recognition Hunch Thing Fails

I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I'm his ideal. By F Scott Fitzgerald Island House Live Man Waiting

Fitzgerald to Zelda's DR. Oct. 1932"Why can't I sell my short stories?" she says."Because you're not putting yourself in them. Do you think the Post pays me for nothing?"(She wants to make money but she wants to save her good stuff for books so her stories are simply casually observed, unfelt phenomena, while mine are sectiobs, debased, over- simplified, if you like, of my own soul. That is our bread and butter and her health and Scotty's education.) p. 221 By F Scott Fitzgerald Zelda Fitzgerald Oct Stories Debased

My God, she's good-looking!" said Mr. Sandwood, who was just over thirty."Good-looking!" cried Mr. Hedrick contemptuously, "she always looks as if she wanted to be kissed! Turning those big cow-eyes on every calf in town!"It was doubtful if Mr. Hedrick intended a reference to the maternal instinct. By F Scott Fitzgerald Goodlooking God Sandwood Hedrick Thirty

The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens - finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. By F Scott Fitzgerald Mile Jumping Gardens Finally Run

You are mine-you know you're mine! he cried wildly ... the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened ... the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes. By F Scott Fitzgerald Mine Mineyou Wildly Cried Listened

You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility. By F Scott Fitzgerald Otherswell Girl Waysin Responsibility Sunshine

If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again. By F Scott Fitzgerald Heart Bring Bitterness Hatred World

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Cute Respect Love Simply Guess

The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky. By F Scott Fitzgerald Montana Sky Sunset Lay Mountains

Women didn't come into men's rooms and sink into men's Humes. Women brought laundry and took your seat in the street-car and married you later on when you were old enough to know fetters. By F Scott Fitzgerald Humes Men Women Rooms Sink

The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life. By F Scott Fitzgerald Confusing Unexplained Thirtyfive Sixtyfive Revolve

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Smile Giving Living Sunny Cost

It was not so much fun. His work became confused with Nicole's problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast of late that it seemed to belittle his work. Also, for the purpose of her cure, he had for many years pretended to a rigid domesticity from which he was drifting away, and the pretence became more arduous in this effortless immobility, in which he was inevitably subjected to microscopic examination. When Dick could no longer play what he wanted to play on the piano, it was an indication that life was bring refined down to a point. He stayed in the big room a long time, listening to the buzz of the electric clock, listening to time. By F Scott Fitzgerald Fun Work Listening Nicole Time

You've got an awfully kissable mouth. By F Scott Fitzgerald Mouth Kissable

You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans. By F Scott Fitzgerald Open Americans Men

On either side the fields were beneficently tranquil; the space through which the cavalcade moved was high and limitless. In the country there was less noise as though they were all listening atavistically for wolves in the wide snow. By F Scott Fitzgerald Tranquil Limitless Side Fields Beneficently

The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. By F Scott Fitzgerald Night Grotesque Fantastic Conceits Haunted

The cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice-box with the left overs. By F Scott Fitzgerald Pantry Necessity Cracked Retained Service

It's your turn to be the centre, to give others what was given to you for so long. You've got to give security to young people and peace to your husband, and a sort of charity to the old. You've got to let the people who work for you depend on you. You've got to cover up a few more troubles than you show, and be a little more patient than the average person, and do a little more instead of a little less than your share. The light and glitter of the world is in your hands. By F Scott Fitzgerald Give Centre Long Turn People

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Candy Youth Big Plate Sentimentalists

It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisyit increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions. By F Scott Fitzgerald Daisyit Eyes Excited Men Loved

Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened slightly with the ghost of a superior 'Hm!'. By F Scott Fitzgerald Wilson Head Shook Superior Eyes

What was it? Why won't you tell me?""I don't want to break down your illusions.""My dear man, I have no illusions about you.""I mean illusions about yourself. By F Scott Fitzgerald Illusions Illusions Man You Break

Fatigue was a drug as well as a poison, and Stahr apparently derived some rare almost physical pleasure from working lightheaded with weariness. By F Scott Fitzgerald Stahr Fatigue Poison Weariness Drug

MR. ICKY: Is your mind in good shape? DIVINE: (Gloomily) Fair. After all what is brilliance? Merely the tact to sow when no one is looking and reap when every one is. By F Scott Fitzgerald Icky Divine Gloomily Fair Shape

When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it. By F Scott Fitzgerald Beautiful Shell Feeling Regret Inside

You should have risen above it," I said smugly. "It's not a slam at you when people are rude it's a slam at the people they've met before. By F Scott Fitzgerald Smugly Slam Risen People Rude

He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful- then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. By F Scott Fitzgerald Distance Beautiful Understood Yards Felt

Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. - The Great Gatsby. By F Scott Fitzgerald Back Time Spree Make Fool

Then the storm came swiftly, first falling from the heavens, then doubly falling in torrents from the mountains and washing loud down the roads and stone ditches; with it came a dark, frightening sky and savage filaments of lightning and world-splitting thunder, while ragged, destroying clouds fled along past the hotel. Mountains and lake disappeared - the hotel crouched amid tumult, chaos and darkness. By F Scott Fitzgerald Falling Mountains Hotel Swiftly Heavens

He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. By F Scott Fitzgerald Care Wanted Left Beauty Anymore

That's my Middle West-not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. By F Scott Fitzgerald Middle Westnot Swede Towns Youth

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future. By F Scott Fitzgerald Places Future Moving Vacated Simply

The college dreamed on awake. He felt a nervous excitement that might have been the very throb of its slow heart. It was a stream where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be vanishing almost as it left his hand. As yet he had nothing, he had taken nothing. By F Scott Fitzgerald Awake College Dreamed Heart Felt

When they met again two days later it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was somehow betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever and 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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Gatsby Breathless Betrayed Met Days

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. By F Scott Fitzgerald Blew Room Flags Twisting Ceiling

Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food. By F Scott Fitzgerald Man Food Hunger Faith Feed

He felt that if he had a love he would have hung her picture just facing the tub so that, lost in the soothing steamings of the hot water, he might lie and look up at her and muse warmly and sensuously on her beauty. By F Scott Fitzgerald Lost Water Beauty Felt Love

I want excitement; and I don't care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat. By F Scott Fitzgerald Excitement Beat Care Form Pay

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you By F Scott Fitzgerald Poetry Lives Fire Inside

When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better. By F Scott Fitzgerald Inferiors Firstrate Author Exquisite Lovely

It seemed a tragedy to want nothing - and yet he wanted something, something. He knew in flashes what it was - some path of hope to lead him toward what he thought was an imminent and ominous old age. By F Scott Fitzgerald Tragedy Wanted Age Knew Flashes

don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous. Clothilde By F Scott Fitzgerald Bed Early Clothilde Nervous Suspected

Your photograph is all I have: it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night. By F Scott Fitzgerald Night Photograph Morning Wake Frantic

The grass is full of ghosts tonight.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.' They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees. 'You know,' whispered Tom, 'what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years.' ... And what we leave here is more than class; it's the whole heritage of youth. We're just one generation we're breaking all the links that seemed to bind us her to top-booted and high-stocked generations. We've walked arm and arm with Burr and Light-Horse Harry Lee through half these deep-blue nights.' 'That's what they are,' Tom tangented off, 'deep-blue a bit of color would spoil them, make them exotic.' Spries, against a sky that's a promise of dawn, and blue light on the slate roofs it hurts ... rather' 'Good-by, Aaron Burr,' Amory called toward deserted Nassau Hall, 'you and I knew strange corners of life. By F Scott Fitzgerald Tonight Grass Full Ghosts Tom

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] By F Scott Fitzgerald Gatsby Daisy Dock Thought Picked

I'm not sentimentalI'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,is that the sentimental person thinks things will lastthe romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won't. By F Scott Fitzgerald Sentimentali Romantic Idea Knowis Person

She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone. His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary's eternal significance. By F Scott Fitzgerald Suddenly Daughter Light Joseph Mary

I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there's a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see. By F Scott Fitzgerald Bad Give Party Toilette Brawl

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. By F Scott Fitzgerald Snobbishly Suggested Repeat Birth Afraid

Nevertheless, his very superiority kept him from being a success in collegethe independence was mistaken for egotism, and the refusal to accept Yale standards with the proper awe seemed to belittle all those who had. By F Scott Fitzgerald Yale Egotism Superiority Success Collegethe

Possibly it had occurred to him the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. [ ... ] It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one. By F Scott Fitzgerald Possibly Forever Occurred Colossal Significance

The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows - the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back. By F Scott Fitzgerald Bellows Life Back Span Seventyfive

The movies remind me of the Triangle Club at Princeton. I used to belong to it, and we always started out firm in our decision to create new and startling things. We always ended up by producing the same old show. In the beginning, our enthusiasm and ideals discarded as rubbish all the old fossilized plots. By F Scott Fitzgerald Princeton Triangle Club Movies Remind

When Eleanor's arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes. By F Scott Fitzgerald Eleanor Arm Touched Felt Hands

Clark," she said softly, "I wouldn't change you for the world. You're sweet the way you are. The things that'll make you fail I'll love always the living in the past, the lazy days and nights you have, and all your carelessness and generosity. By F Scott Fitzgerald Clark Softly World Change Sweet

Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely - taking almost a delight in the thrust. Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say. Often he would eventually trace these portentous reticences to some physical discomfort - of these she never complained until they were over - or to some carelessness or presumption in him, or to an unsatisfactory dish at dinner, but even then the means by which she created the infinite distances she spread about herself were a mystery, buried somewhere back in those twenty-two years of unwavering pride. By F Scott Fitzgerald Anthony Purposely Taking Thrust Knew

Looking back over a decade one sees the ideal of a university become a myth, a vision, a meadow lark among the smoke stacks. Yet perhaps it is there at Princeton, only more elusive than under the skies of the Prussian Rhineland or Oxfordshire; or perhaps some men come upon it suddenly and possess it, while others wander forever outside. Even these seek in vain through middle age for any corner of the republic that preserves so much of what is fair, gracious, charming and honorable in American life. By F Scott Fitzgerald Myth Vision Stacks Back Decade

No ... no ... We never forgive those we can understand ... We can only forgive those who wound us for no reason at all ... By F Scott Fitzgerald Forgive Understand Wound Reason

Goodnight, child. This is a damn shame. Let's drop it out of the picture." He gave her two lines of hospital patter to go to sleep on. "So many people are going to love you and it might be nice to meet your first love all intact, emotionally too. That's an old-fashioned idea, isn't it? By F Scott Fitzgerald Goodnight Child Love Shame Damn

Very strong personalities must confine themselves in mutual conversation to very gentle subjects. By F Scott Fitzgerald Subjects Strong Personalities Confine Mutual

Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table. By F Scott Fitzgerald Planned Plead Table Idlers Special

I don't think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart. By F Scott Fitzgerald Responding Magnet Helping Promising Happy

For those minutes courage flowed like wine out of the November dusk, and he was the eternal hero, one with the sea-rover on the prow of a Norse galley, one with Roland and Horatius, Sir Nigel and Ted Coy, scraped and stripped into trim and then flung by his own will into the breach, beating back the tide, hearing from afar the thunder of cheers . . . finally bruised and weary, but still elusive, circling an end, twisting, changing pace, straight-arming . . . falling behind the Groton goal with two men on his legs, in the only touchdown of the game. THE By F Scott Fitzgerald Horatius Sir Coy November Norse

Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty. By F Scott Fitzgerald Beauty Night Prepared Bed Smeared

She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude. By F Scott Fitzgerald Catholic Church Mother Attitude Discovering

As he put in his studs he realized that he was enjoying life as he would probably never enjoy it again. Everything was hallowed by the haze of his own youth. He had arrived, abreast of the best in his generation at Princeton. He was in love and his love was returned. By F Scott Fitzgerald Put Studs Realized Enjoying Life

But this can't be true! I can understand, of course, their obedience to women of charm - but to fat women? To bony women? To women with scrawny cheeks? By F Scott Fitzgerald Women True Understand Charm Obedience

I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort. By F Scott Fitzgerald Failure Life Effort Blame Complicated

Cut out all these exclamation jokes. An explanation point is like laughing at your own joke. I'm going to delete you from my contacts if you keep sending solely emoji texts. You're a grown-ass man. By F Scott Fitzgerald Cut Exclamation Jokes Joke Texts

Remember in all society nine girls out of ten marry for money and nine men out of ten are fools. By F Scott Fitzgerald Ten Remember Fools Society Girls

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. By F Scott Fitzgerald Calling Clever Damned Immoral Changed

She would never blame him for being the ineffectual idler so long as he did it sincerely, from the attitude that nothing much was worth doing By F Scott Fitzgerald Sincerely Blame Ineffectual Idler Long

When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he pondered o'er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death:"Thru Time I'll save my love!" he said ... yet Beauty vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead ... -Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair:"Who'd learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet there" ... So all my words, however true, might sing you to a thousandth June, and no one ever know that you were Beauty for an afternoon. By F Scott Fitzgerald Vanity Time Ago Breathlessly Death

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. By F Scott Fitzgerald Intelligence Circumstances Mere Instrument

I learned a little of beauty enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth ... By F Scott Fitzgerald Truth Learned Beauty

If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones. By F Scott Fitzgerald Letters Write Natural

Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. By F Scott Fitzgerald Frisco Suddenly Opal Seizes Air

I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally. By F Scott Fitzgerald Sentimentally Die Violently Fading

I liked 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 into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. By F Scott Fitzgerald Avenue Lives Disapprove Walk Pick

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death. By F Scott Fitzgerald Fight Loneliness Death Traded Love

Her voice sounded like money. By F Scott Fitzgerald Money Voice Sounded

Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handle with gloves. By F Scott Fitzgerald Good