Tender Is The Night Quotes

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“she wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson…" "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway—a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe—all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it.”
― Truman Capote, Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote

“He cared only about people; he was scarcely conscious of places except for their weather, until they had been invested with color by tangible events.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Daddy's girl. Was it a 'itty-bitty bravekins and did it suffer? Oooooo-tweet, de tweetest thing, wasn't she dest too tweet? Before her tiny fist the forces of lust and corruption rolled away; nay, the very march of destiny stopped; inevitably became inevitable, syllogism, dialectic, all rationality fell away”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“you can't hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella”
― Philip Rahv

“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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Nobody seems to bore you," he objected
"About half the world do," she admitted, "but I think that’s a pretty good average, don’t you?" and she turned to find something in Browning that bore on the subject. She was the only person he ever met who could look up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of conversation, and yet not be irritating to distraction. She did it constantly, with such serious enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching her golden hair bent over a book, brow wrinkled so little at hunting her sentence.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“When you smile-" He had recovered his paternal attitude, perhaps because of Nicole's silent proximity, "I always think I'll see a gap where you've lost some baby teeth.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“He is the messenger who tarries yet awhile,
Whose fruit keeps fresh, as he peels it slowly
Within the very doors of death.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.”
― F Scott Fitzgerald