In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald:
So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.
Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.
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.
Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.
So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.
Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.
Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.
It is not merely enough to have the ability to be persistant, you must also have the ability to start over.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.
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.
There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.
Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
The hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta.
Well, I can't describe her exactly-except to say that she was beautiful. She was-tremendously alive.
It's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be.
Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.
Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.
You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.
The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaiety, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.
I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.
I talk with the authority of failure - Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.
A lot of young girls together is a romantic secret thing like the first sight of wild ducks at dawn.
From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.
You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.
Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.
That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
Intelligence is measured by a person's ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.
A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.
I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.
To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.
I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.
Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
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.
The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.
When a man is tired of life on his 21st birthday it indicates that he is rather tired of something in himself.
But I always felt that I'd rather be provincial hot-tamale than soup without seasoning.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
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.
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.
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.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence, but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity.
I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.
I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.
Very strong personalities must confine themselves in mutual conversation to very gentle subjects.
my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.
And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.
The greatest profound pain is cased by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.
I can’t tell you just how wonderful she is. I don’t want you to know. I don’t want any one to know.
I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
He had no plans, no definite intentions, except to kiss her lips again, to hold her in his arms.
I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.
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