Scott F. Fitzgerald > Quotes

“As a rule things happened to Dot. She was not weak, because there was nothing in her to tell her she was being weak. She was not strong because she never knew that some of the things she did were brave. She neither defined nor conformed nor compromised.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Gloria had lulled Anthony's mind to sleep. She, who seemed of all women the wisest and the finest, hung like a brilliant curtain across his doorways, shutting out the light of the sun. In those first few years what he believed bore invariably the stamp of Gloria; he saw the sun always through the pattern of the curtain.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses - bound for dust - mortal -”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings. After a few high-balls there was magic in the tall glowing Arabian night of the Bush Terminal Building - its summit a peak of sheer grandeur, gold and dreaming against the inaccessible sky. And Wall Street, the crass, the banal - again it was a triumph of gold, a gorgeous sentient spectacle; it was where the great kings kept the moment for their wars...
...The fruit of youth, or the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I've often thought that if I hadn't got what I wanted things might have been different with me. I might have found something in my mind and enjoyed putting it in circulation. I might have been content with the work of it, and had some sweet vanity out of the success. I suppose that at one time I could have had anything I wanted, within reason, but that was the only thing that I wanted with any fervour. God! 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 the 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-”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“It seemed a tragedy to want nothing - and yet he wanted something, something. He knew in flashes what it was - and some path of hope to lead him toward what what thought was an imminent and ominous old age.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“The three young men nodded; Bloeckman looked casually about him, his eyes resting critically on the ceiling and then passing lower. His expression combined that of a Middle-Western farmer appraising his wheat-crop and that of an actor wondering whether he is observed - the public manner of all good Americans.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“The - pan-ic - " he began but got no further, for Gloria's hand swung around swiftly and caught him in the cheek. At this he all at once let go of her, and she fell to the floor, her shoulder hitting the table a glancing blow in transit...
Then the room seemed full of men and smoke. There was Tana in his white coat reeling about supported by Maury. Into his flute he was blowing a weird blend of sound that was known, cried Anthony, as the Japanese train song. Joe Hull had found a box of candles and was juggling them, yelling "One down!" every time he missed, and Dick was dancing by himself in a fascinated whirl around and about the room. It appeared to her that everything in the room was staggering in a grotesque fourth-dimensional gyrations through intersecting planes of hazy blue.
Outside the storm had come up amazingly - the lulls within were filled with the scrape of the tall bushes against the house and the roaring of the rain on the tin roof of the kitchen.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“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.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“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...”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“With a tremendous effort Anthony made his acquiescence a twist of subject, and they drifted into and ancient question-and-answer game concerned with each other's pasts, gradually warming as they discovered the age-old, immemorial resemblances in tastes and ideas. They said things that were more revealing than they intended - but each pretended to accept the other at face, or rather word, value.
The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humour. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third - and before long the lines cancel out - and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and our children and business associates are accepted as true.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of civilisation. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on the city street - he was the hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art - he was the virtual moron, performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of threescore years.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“There was, first of all, the sense of waste, always dormant in his heart, now awakened by the circumstances of his position. In his moments of insecurity he was haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after all, significant.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“...I was lost with the rest. I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Silence! I am about to unburden myself of many memorable remarks reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of such skies.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“With a tremendous effort Anthony made his acquiescence a twist of subject, and they drifted into and ancient question-and-answer game concerned with each other's pasts, gradually warming as they discovered the age-old, immemorial resemblances in tastes and ideas. They said things that were more revealing than they intended - but each pretended to accept the other at face, or rather word, value.
The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humour. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third - and before long the lines cancel out - and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and our children and business associates are accepted as true.”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald

“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away”
― Scott F. Fitzgerald