F. Scott Fitzgerald

Appears on a 23-cent US postage stamp as part of the Literary Arts series, debuting 9/27/96 in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Had first heart attack at Schwabs Drugstore on Sunset Boulevard in November of 1940.

Attended Princeton University.

He moved to Paris in 1924, where he wrote his third novel, "The Great Gatsby". The Fitzgeralds returned to the U.S. in 1930.

Was named after Francis Scott Key , a distant relative.

His wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, died eight years after he did, in a fire at the mental hospital where she was institutionalized.

Died of a heart attack in Hollywood while writing "The Last Tycoon", a novel that was published unfinished.

First novel was "This Side of Paradise", written shortly after attending Princeton.

The "Gatsby Style", named for his 1925 novel "The Great Gatsby", was honored on one of 15 32 US commemorative postage stamps in the Celebrate the Century series, issued 28 May 1998, celebrating the 1920s.

He tried writing movie scripts but was frustrated by the image-based medium, which he had difficulty comprehending as it was so different from the language-based forms of the novel and short-story that he excelled in.

Was a mentor and close friend of the young Ernest Hemingway , who grew more distant with him as Hemingways fame grew and Fitzgeralds declined, and he became increasingly more dependent on alcohol. Hemingway disapproved of Fitzgeralds lowering his great talent to write high-priced stories for slick commercial magazines like "The Saturday Evening Post" and his sojourns to Hollywood to make money writing screenplays. Unlike his great contemporaries Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck , Hemingway never wrote for the movies, but he had no objection to selling his novels and short stories to the studios.

Coined the term "The Jazz Age" in reference to the Roaring Twenties.

Is portrayed by Malcolm Gets in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle

He was nominated in the 2007 inaugural New Jersey Hall of Fame for his services to literature.

Is buried at St. Marys Catholic Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland.

Father, with Zelda Sayre , of daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith.

He was elected into the 2008 New Jersey Hall of Fame for his contributions and services to literature.

Irish-American.

One of the people depicted in the Jazz Age sequences of Woody Allen s Midnight in Paris .

For about a year and a half in the late 1930s, he rented a house from Edward Everett Horton on Hortons "Belly Acres" estate in Encino. The area where the house was is now part of the 101 highway (westbound lane). Fitzgerald paid 200 dollars a month rent.

Started writing while in college.

Through his fathers Warfield ancestry he is the fourth cousin once removed of Wallis Warfield Simpson who became Dutchess of Windsor. Their common ancestors were John Warfield and Judith Gaither who were born in the mid 1600s.

[on belief] At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; at 45,they are caves in which we hide.

[on age and aging in your 20s] One of those men who reach such an acute,limited excellence at 21 that everything afterward savors of,anti-climax.

[on free will] The man who arrives young believes that he exercises his,will because his star is shining. The man who only asserts himself at,30 has a balanced idea of what will-power and fate have each,contributed. The one who gets there at 40 is liable to put the emphasis,on will alone.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them,soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way,that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.

They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are,because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for,ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us,they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to,start over.

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas,have died there.

Grow up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to,ship it and go from one childhood to another.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed,ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to,function.

Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused,all that trouble.

There are no second acts in American lives.

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.

Ah," she cried, "you look so cool. " Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. You always look so cool," she repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.

Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.

They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?,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.

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.

If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth. . .

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

That’s going to be your trouble — judgment about yourself. (Tender is the Night),Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.

I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.

Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain.

A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement --discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.

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.

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

Art invariably grows out of a period when, in general, the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval.

Artistic temperament is like a king with vigor and unlimited opportunity. You shake the structure to pieces by playing with it.

Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself - art, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was safe now, free from all hysteria - he could accept what was acceptable, roam, grow, rebel, sleep deep through many nights. . . There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth - yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams. . . And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed. . . He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. "I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.

By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.

Human sympathy has its limits.

The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap.

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.

They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.

New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.

Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world. . . . The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head.

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing. ” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. 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. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

For America is composed not of two sorts of people, but of two frames of mind - the first engaged in doing what is would like to do, the second pretending that such things do not exist.

Breathing dreams like air,It was a curious day, slashed abruptly with fleeting, familiar impressions.

The attitude of the city on his action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city, but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial. He was completely indifferent to popular opinion.

Communism as I see it has no place in the United States, and the American people will not stand for its teachings.

The important thing is that you should not argue with them [Communists]. . . . Whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind, ‘Fascist,’ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Trotskyist,’ and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process.

Communism. . . muat of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.

He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.

I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.

It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful — then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.

Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten remoteness of the afternoon.

I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

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.

The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.

Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.

Courage is a sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.

My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.

I want excitement; and I don’t care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat.

I am glad you are happy--but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

I mean the women who, without any of the prerogatives of youth and beauty, demand continual slavery from their men. . . . They sit back complacently and watch their husbands slave for them; and, without furnishing any of the pleasantries of life for their husbands, they demand the sort of continual attention that a charming fiancée might get. . . . They are harridans and shrews who continually nag and scold until the men are driven idiotic.

This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, "a constant striving" (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it) only adds to this unhappiness in the end--that end that comes to our youth and hope.

A fellow has to believe in something, Jay-such as the rottenness of humanity.

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds. . . . it is an absolute fact---so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.

I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go,She walked rather quickly; she liked to be active, though at times she gave an impression of repose that was at once static and evocative. This was because she knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent, contributing just her share of urbane humor with a precision that approached meagreness. But at the moment when strangers tended to grow uncomfortable in the presence of this economy she would seize the topic and rush off with it, feverishly surprised with herself-- then bring it back and relinquish it abruptly, almost timidly, like an obedient retriever, having been adequate and something more.

In the morning you were never violently sorry-- you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.

There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.

It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.

The tears coursed down her cheeks- not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets.

I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy — why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.

Men don’t often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.

I detest these underdone men, he thought coldly. Boiled looking! Ought to be shoved back in the oven; just one more minute would do it.

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

Always, after he was in bed, there were voices - indefinite, fading, enchanting - just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorites waking dreams.

. . . he told me all the things he liked to THINK he thought in the misty past.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain. . .

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.

We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.

They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

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.

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.

There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.

Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.

The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

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.

I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

Under the glass porte-cochère of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became grey and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxicabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad.

The present was the thing--work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life,Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn . . . No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men.

That most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man".

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life--not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.

Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it--later in life he almost completely slew it--but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys. . . unscrupulousness. . . the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil. . . a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty. . . a shifting sense of honor. . . an unholy selfishness. . . a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex. There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up. . . a harsh phrase from the lips of an older boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity. . . he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect. Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to "pass" as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world. . . with this background did Amory drift into adolescence.

Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur standing had very little value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably be her principal study for years to come. She had begun as he had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room conversation culled from a slightly older set. Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of blasé sophistication. She had lived in a larger city and had slightly an advantage in range. But she accepted his pose--it was one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair. He was aware that he was getting this particular favor now because she had been coached; he knew that he stood for merely the best game in sight, and that he would have to improve his opportunity before he lost his advantage. So they proceeded with an infinite guile that would have horrified her parents.

Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.

A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. . . . He aspires to create new and original works. His way is alone. If he succumbs to ideologies, he turns into a mouthpiece. He must hang on to his identity for dear life. In the end he must rely on his own judgment. It’s the only way to survive as a writer and an artist.

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.

The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.

Character is plot, plot is character.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

Never miss a party. . . good for the nerves--like celery.

He found that the business of optimism was no mean task.

Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

Her fine high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet and shining, the colour of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood -- she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.

A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.

This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ — and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing — oh, that eternal hand!— a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.

Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that. . .

The fruit of youth or of 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.

Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty.

Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely—taking almost a delight in the thrust. Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say. Often he would eventually trace these portentous reticences to some physical discomfort—of these she never complained until they were over—or to some carelessness or presumption in him, or to an unsatisfactory dish at dinner, but even then the means by which she created the infinite distances she spread about herself were a mystery, buried somewhere back in those twenty-two years of unwavering pride.

In April war was declared with Germany. Wilson and his cabinet—a cabinet that in its lack of distinction was strangely reminiscent of the twelve apostles—let loose the carefully starved dogs of war, and the press began to whoop hysterically against the sinister morals, sinister philosophy, and sinister music produced by the Teutonic temperament. Those who fancied themselves particularly broad-minded made the exquisite distinction that it was only the German Government which aroused them to hysteria; the rest were worked up to a condition of retching indecency. Any song which contained the word "mother" and the word "kaiser" was assured of a tremendous success. At last every one had something to talk about—and almost every one fully enjoyed it, as though they had been cast for parts in a sombre and romantic play.

This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.

Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

Rather nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.

Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.

Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?" -,The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.

Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair. . . Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

My own rule is to let everything alone.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

All I think of ever is that I love you.

One o’ clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping sentences of an enraptured man. Four o’clock: her little feet moving to melody, her face distinct in the crowd, her partner happy as a petted puppy and mad as the immemorial hatter…,She was one of those people who are famous beyond their actual achievement.

My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis-- a moulding of the confusion of life into form.

The movies remind me of the Triangle Club at Princeton. I used to belong to it, and we always started out firm in our decision to create new and startling things. We always ended up by producing the same old show. In the beginning, our enthusiasm and ideals discarded as rubbish all the old fossilized plots.

Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual «There!» yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality - he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor.

A man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.

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.

but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.

If the bonus army conquered Washington the lawyer had a boat hidden in the Sacramento River, and he was going to row upstream for a few months and then come back “because they always needed lawyers after a revolution to straighten out all the legal side.

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

Most of the big shore places were closed now. And there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of the ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away till gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes, A fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. For a transitory, enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent. Face to face, for the last time in history, with something commensurate to its capacity for wonder.

What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe - why, intelligence never built a steam-engine! Circumstances built a steam-engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.

She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes. . . He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrap-book of his life.

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes. . .

Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.

The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.

. . . and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires,This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part. It is somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.

She was appalled by West Egg’s raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that eroded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.

She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. . .

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.

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.

There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness.

And then, one fairy night, May became June.

Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter…Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night. Walking alone…was it splendor, or what, we were bound with?Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground withTapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.

His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.

I became bored - that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts.

Isn’t Hollywood a dump — in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms fartherAnd then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

America is a willingness of the heart.

First you take a drink then the drink takes a drink then the drink takes you.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

One should . . . be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Grow up and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over.

One should . . . be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane. . . There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

Forgotten is forgiven.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

The victor belongs to the spoils.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming. .