Ruby Grace

“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

“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

“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

“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