F Scott Fitzgerald Benjamin Button Quotes

You’re just the romantic age,” she continued- “fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is- oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.” - Hildegarde

I might have enjoyed the company of a woman or two... Or three but that had never stopped me from loving you.

So he nodded, smiled, listened, was happy.

A rigour passed over him, blood rose into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a steady thumping in his ears. It was first love.

When his son was dressed Mr. Button regarded him with depression. The costume consisted of dotted socks, pink pants, and a belted blouse with a wide white collar. Over the latter waved the long whitish beard, drooping almost to the waist. The effect was not good.

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.

Benjamin discovered that he was becoming more and more attracted by the gay side of life. It

he found, as the new century gathered headway, that his thirst for gayety grew stronger.

Benjamin started; an almost chemical change seemed to dissolve and recompose the very elements of his body. A rigour passed over him, blood rose into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a steady thumping in his ears. It was first love.

Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal--with an effort he choked back the impulse. "You're just the romantic age," she continued--"fifty. Twenty-five is too wordly-wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is--oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.

He wanted a world that was like walking through rain,

Courage—just that; courage as a rule of life, and something to cling to always.

My courage is faith—faith in the eternal resilience of me—that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity

All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase—‘I love you.

She had been kissed once and made love to six times.

A full moon drenched the road to the lustreless color of platinum, and late-blooming harvest flowers breathed into the motionless air aromas that were like low, half-heard laughter.

And then when I’d begun to feel that after all life was scarcely worth living I found something”—her eyes went skyward exultantly—“I found something!

there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him.

They had forgotten – as people inevitably forget

Snobbishness is, after all, merely good breeding grown dictatorial; so Samuel’s code remained, but the necessity of imposing it upon others had faded out in a certain gutter.

There are times when you almost tell the harmless old lady next door what you really think of her face—that it ought to be on a night-nurse in a house for the blind; when you’d like to ask the man you’ve been waiting ten minutes for if he isn’t all overheated from racing the postman down the block; when you nearly say to the waiter that if they deducted a cent from the bill for every degree the soup was below tepid the hotel would owe you half a dollar; when—and this is the infallible earmark of true exasperation—a smile affects you as an oil-baron’s undershirt affects a cow’s husband. But the moment passes. Scars may remain on your dog or your collar or your telephone receiver, but your soul has slid gently back into its place between the lower edge of your heart and the upper edge of your stomach, and all is at peace.

You see, I am fate,” it shouted, “and stronger than your puny plans; and I am how-things-turn-out and I am different from your little dreams, and I am the flight of time and the end of beauty and unfulfilled desire; all the accidents and imperceptions and the little minutes that shape the crucial hours are mine. I am the exception that proves no rules, the limits of your control, the condiment in the dish of life.

To add to the breach, he found, as the new century gathered headway, that his thirst for gaiety grew stronger.

For another instant life was radiant and time a phantom and their strength eternal—

took life as he found it.

he did these things only because they were expected of him, and because he was by nature obliging.

Roger Button’s silent agreement with himself to believe in his son’s normality.

The registrar pointed sternly to the door. ‘Get out,’ he said. ‘Get out of college and get out of town. You are a dangerous lunatic.

Blind with enchantment, he felt that life was just beginning.

No one believed it. You had only to look at Benjamin and see.

more attracted by the gay side

home had for him so little charm that he decided to join the army.

a chasm began to widen between them.

There was only one fly in the delicious ointment

stupefied

This is your child, and you’ll have to make the best of it.

for a dark instant Mr Button wished passionately that his son was black

He merely warned his son that he would ‘stunt his growth.

A grotesque picture formed itself with dreadful clarity before the eyes of the tortured man

The remaining brush of scraggly hair; the watery eyes, the ancient teeth, seemed oddly out of tone with the gayety of the costume.

mostly they just stayed round in this languid paradise of dreamy skies and firefly evenings and noisy niggery street fairs—and especially of gracious, soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.

As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known.

A grotesque picture formed itself with dreadful clarity before the eyes of the tortured man—a picture of himself walking through the crowded streets of the city with this appalling apparition stalking by his side.

The girl was slender and frail, with hair that was ashen under the moon and honey-coloured under the sputtering gas-lamps of the porch.

I don't want to be made a monkey of—" "You've made a monkey of me!" retorted Mr. Button fiercely.

Am I mad?" thundered Mr. Button, his terror resolving into rage. "Is this some ghastly hospital joke?

The cool perspiration redoubled on Mr. Button's forehead.

The word had gone around that a lunatic had passed the entrance examinations for Yale and attempted to palm himself off as a youth of eighteen.

The old man untied the package and viewed the contents with a quizzical eye.

la vida se puede contemplar mucho mejor desde una sola ventana.

Pero hay dos maneras de hacer las cosas: una correcta y otra equivocada. Si tú has decidido ser distinto del resto del mundo, dudo que yo sea capaz de impedírtelo, pero me parece que no es muy considerado de tu parte.