Ruby Grace

“...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

“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

“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

“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