β
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald
β
Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won't.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Actually thatβs my secret β I canβt even talk about you to anybody because I donβt want any more people to know how wonderful you are.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
Writers arenβt people exactly. Or, if theyβre any good, theyβre a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon)
β
Think how you love me,' she whispered. 'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.'
You'll always be like this to me.'
Oh no; but promise me you'll remember.' Her tears were falling. 'I'll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Magnetism)
β
...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
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
And in the end, we were all just humans, drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.
β
β
Christopher Poindexter
β
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.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
I don't want to live, I want to love first and live incidentally.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald
β
I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
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 tonight
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.
--The Sensible Thing
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Short Stories)
β
I love you, even if there isnβt any me, or any love, or even any life. I love you.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald
β
You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Modern Library Classics))
β
why shouldn't he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase-- 'I love you
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Offshore Pirate)
β
mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and--and in love before they're born.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
Someday I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered βListen,β a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
Excuse me for being so intellectual. I know you would prefer something nice and feminine and affectionate.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
All I think of ever is that I love you.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
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?
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
Thanks again for saving me. Someday, Iβll save you too.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
Love is fragile -- she was thinking -- but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love-words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (May Day)
β
She was beautiful, but not like those girls in magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.
β
β
Natalie Newman (Butterflies and Bullshit)
β
He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was ....
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. 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.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
I love you anyway-even if there isn't any me or any love or even any life-
I love you.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this - so accidental - just when everything was going well.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
without you, dearest dearest I couldn't see or hear or feel or think - or live - I love you so and I'm never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald
β
You've got an awfully kissable mouth.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatsby Girls)
β
I wish I had done everything on earth with you
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Why is there happiness and comfort and excitement where you are and no where else in the world?
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
You are mysterious, I love you. Youβre beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and thatβs the rarest known combination.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
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.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
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...
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Beauty and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Nothing could have survived our life.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
Men donβt often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Last Tycoon)
β
Just donβt give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I donβt think you can go wrong.
β
β
Ella Fitzgerald
β
Iβm so damn glad I love you β I wouldnβt love any other man on earth β I bβlieve if I had deliberately decided on a sweetheart, heβd have been you.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
I dont' want to live - I want to love first, and live incidentally.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald
β
Youβre just the romantic age,β she continued- βfifty. 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.β - Hildegarde
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
β
If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
If you're in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses ... We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o'clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
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.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
The fire blazing in her dark and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
Amory: I love you.
Rosalind: I love you- now.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
Clark," she said softly, "I wouldn't change you for the world.
You're sweet the way you are. The things that'll make you fail
I'll love always-- the living in the past, the lazy days and
nights you have, and all your carelessness and generosity.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Ice Palace)
β
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past..
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
My dear, I think of you always and at night I build myself a warm nest of things I remember and float in your sweetness till morning.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald
β
But you can love more than just one person, can't you?
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
I might have enjoyed the company of a woman or two... Or three but that had never
stopped me from loving you.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
β
When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birdsβ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
I donβt want to liveβ β¨I want to love first, and liveβ¦incidentally.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatsby Girls)
β
It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatsby Girls)
β
Your photograph is all I have: it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
Kiss me now, love me now.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
You are mine-you know you're mine!" he cried wildly...the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened...the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
All these soft, warm nights going to waste when I ought to be lying in your arms under the moon - the dearest arms in all the world - darling arms that I love to feel around me - How much longer - before theyβll be there to stay? When I do get home again, youβll certainly have a most awful time ever moving me one inch from you.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to makes such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person I thought it was your secret pride."
"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."
She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatsby Girls)
β
He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want -- not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable...'very few things matter and nothing matters very much
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.
β
β
Elizabeth Hardwick (Seduction and Betrayal)
β
When I'm with you, I don't breathe quite right.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatsby Girls)
β
When I read the actual story-how Gatsby loves Daisy so much but can't ever be with her no matter how hard he tries-I feel like ripping the book in half and calling up Fitzgerald and telling him his book is all wrong, even though I know Fitzgerald is probably deceased. Especially when Gatsby is shot dead in his swimming pool the first time he goes for a swim all summer, Daisy doesn't even go to his funeral, Nick and Jordan part ways, and Daisy ends up sticking with racist Tom, whose need for sex basically murders an innocent woman, you can tell Fitzgerald never took the time to look up at clouds during sunset, because there's no silver lining at the end of that book, let me tell you.
β
β
Matthew Quick (The Silver Linings Playbook)
β
Thereβs nothing in all the world I want but you and your precious love. All the material things are nothing. Iβd just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence because youβd soon love me less and less and Iβd do anything β anything β to keep your heart for my own. I donβt want to liveβI want to love first, and live incidentallyβ¦ Donβtβdonβt ever think of the things you canβt give me. Youβve trusted me with the dearest heart of allβand itβs so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
All of which isnβt to say that Jeremy Fitzgerald did the right thing or the wrong thing. Itβs only to say this: love always changes everything.
β
β
Nicola Yoon (The Sun is Also a Star)
β
He snatched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his burred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
you once liked me, didn't you?, he asked.
LIKED you- I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
His dark eyes took me in, and I wondered what they would look like if he fell in love.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon)
β
You should have risen above it," I said smugly. "It's not a slam at you when people are rude -- it's a slam at the people they've met before.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon)
β
and will I like being called a jazz baby? --You will love it.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
There's no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it at all.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon)
β
I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatsby Girls)
β
I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatsby Girls)
β
These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desireβI shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon)
β
He loved her, and he would love her until the day he was too old for loving--but he could not have her. 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.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Winter Dreams)
β
They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
Life has puffed and blown itself into a summer day, and clouds and spring billow over the heavens as if calendars were a listing of mathematical errors.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
...there seemed some necessity of taking all or nothing; it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved--so easy to be loved--so hard to love.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.'
He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Short Stories)
β
They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale---and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
I feared so-you're sentimental. You're not like me. I'm a romantic little materialist."
"I'm not sentimental-I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last-the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
Things to worry about:
Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship
Things not to worry about:
Donβt worry about popular opinion
Donβt worry about dolls
Donβt worry about the past
Donβt worry about the future
Donβt worry about growing up
Donβt worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Donβt worry about triumph
Donβt worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Donβt worry about mosquitoes
Donβt worry about flies
Donβt worry about insects in general
Donβt worry about parents
Donβt worry about boys
Donβt worry about disappointments
Donβt worry about pleasures
Donβt worry about satisfactions
Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?
With dearest love,
Daddy
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
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.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. Itβs just that they donβt love me back.
β
β
David Nicholls (Starter for Ten)
β
But some day I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them--always thinking people are so important--especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it--on the inside.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon)
β
all the time something within her was crying for a decision.
She wanted her life shaped now, immediately β and the decision must be made by some force β of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality β that was close at hand
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
I am really only myself when Iβm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
I want to do everything in the world with you.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Men she knew'? - she had conceded vaguely to herself that all men who had ever been in love with her were her friends.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
She is the most charming person in the world. Thatβs all. I refuse to amplify. Excepting- sheβs perfect.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
Under the stars,' she repeated. 'I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to someone. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.'
It was a dream,' said John quietly. 'Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.'
How pleasant then to be insane!'
So I'm told,' said John gloomily. 'I don't know any longer. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Other Stories)
β
Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Two souls are sometimes created together and in love before they're born
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Being in love, she concluded, is simply the presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone. Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure, she thought, another chance in life.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Save Me the Waltz)
β
The voice fell low, sank into her breast and stretched the tight bodice over her heart as she came up close. He felt the young lips, her body sighing in relief against the arm growing stronger to hold her. There were now no more plans than if Dick had arbitrarily made some indissoluble mixture, with atoms joined and inseparable; you could throw it all out but never again could they fit back into atomic scale. As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
Summer has no day,' she said. 'We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. 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.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
My courage is faith--faith in the eternal resilience of me--that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide--not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often--and the female hell is deadlier than the male.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatsby Girls)
β
Being in love, she concluded, is simply a presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald
β
Stahr's eyes and Kathleen's met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon)
β
I don't think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Short Stories)
β
She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter - like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination, Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it, and everything all at once seemed gorgeous.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
There was a midsummer restlessness abroadβearly August with imprudent loves and impulsive crimes.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon)
β
She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Save Me the Waltz)
β
The sky lay over the city like a map showing the strata of things and the big full moon toppled over in a furrow like the abandoned wheel of a gun carriage on a sunset field of battle and the shadows walked like cats and I looked into the white and ghostly interior of things and thought of you and I looked on their structural outsides and thought of you and was lonesome.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and itβs these things Iβd believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasnβt all that she should be. . . . I love her and thatβs the beginning and end of everything. βF. SCOTT FITZGERALD
β
β
Robyn Schneider (The Beginning of Everything)
β
The Great Gatsby's my favorite book," he says. "F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated it to Zelda."
"His wife?" I say.
"Yeah. His crazy-ass wife who he had no business loving that much," he says, giving me a loaded look. "You know what their joint epitaph says? It's a quote from the book... Their kid picked it for them."
I shake my head. "What's it say?"
His eyes close halfway as he recites, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
β
β
Rick Yancey (The 5th Wave (The 5th Wave, #1))
β
I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
Nothing except luck protects you from catastrophe. Not love. Not money. Not faith. Not a pure heart or good deeds--and not bad ones either, for that matter. We can, any of us, be laid low, cut down, diminished, destroyed.
β
β
Therese Anne Fowler (Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
Her love had reached a point where now at last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don't like this kiss-and-forget.'
'But I don't want to argue. I think it's wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can't it'll be time to argue.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
He hadnβt once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
Thereβs a writer for you,β he said. βKnows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.β
[narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writersβbecause if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answerβstill it belittled him in my eyes. Writers arenβt people exactly. Or, if theyβre any good, theyβre a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. Itβs like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward tryingβonly to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon)
β
The night you gave me my birthday partyβ¦ you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasnβt I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
I found something! Courage--just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
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.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
β
When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he pondered o'er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death:
"Thru Time I'll save my love!" he said. . . yet Beauty vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead. . .
-Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair:
"Who'd learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet there". . . So all my words, however true, might sing you to a thousandth June, and no one ever know that you were Beauty for an afternoon.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
He kissed her because it came about quite naturally; he found sweetness sleeping still upon her lips, and felt that he had never been away.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
The price for his intactness was incompleteness.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
credit is something that should be given to others. If you are in a position to give credit to yourself, then you do not need it.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon)
β
How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
. . . she tried to weave the strength of her father and the young beauty of her first love with David, the happy oblivion of her teens and her warm protected childhood into a magic cloak.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (The Collected Writings)
β
I have come to the conclusion that the most important element in human life is faith.
If God were to take away all His blessings, health, physical fitnes, wealth, intelligence, and leave me but one gift, I would ask for faith β- for with faith in Him, in His goodness, mercy, love for me, and belief in everlasting life, I believe I could suffer the loss of my other gifts and still be happy....
β
β
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (Times to Remember)
β
They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression-- yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarecly tolerated guest at a party she was giving.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
David, Iβll fly for you, if youβll love me!β
βFly, then.β
βI canβt fly, but love me anyway.β
βPoor wingless child!β
βIs it so hard to love me?β
βDo you think you are easy, my illusive possession?
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Save Me the Waltz)
β
Believe me, I may be a bit blasΓ©, but I can still get any man I want.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatsby Girls)
β
Author note re: Torn (Book #2)..."There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice!" ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
β
Kim Karr (Connected (Connections, #1))
β
She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gatsby Girls)
β
There's nothing wrong with being a little girl, love. Little girls are fearless.
β
β
Bea Fitzgerald (Girl, Goddess, Queen)
β
The track curved and now it was going away from the sun, which as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
They were still in the happier stages 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.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically when they read ... Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Suddenly he was inside the radius of her perfume and kissing her breathlessly.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (First Blood)
β
He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
People fall in and out of love all the time. I wonder how they manage it.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon)
β
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...
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she didn't, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. . . . Well, there I was, 'way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?" On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy in his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day, with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his arm a little, and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised. They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
I knew that what was left of me would always love you, but never in quite the same way.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
Their eyes met, locked, became wistful, and dreamy and beautiful.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Love always changes everything.
β
β
Nicola Yoon (The Sun Is Also a Star)
β
It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald (I believe that is how he spells his name) seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
Everybody gives you belief for the asking,' she said to David, 'and so few people give you anything more to believe in than your own belief - just not letting you down, that's all. Its so hard to find a person who accepts responsibilities beyond what you ask.'
'So easy to be loved - so hard to love.' David answered
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Save Me the Waltz)
β
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.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
You're a rotten driver,' I protested. 'Either you ought to be more careful or you oughtn't to drive at all.'
'I am careful.'
'No, you're not.'
'Well, other people are,' she said lightly.
'What's that got to do with it?'
'They'll keep out of my way,' she insisted. 'It takes two to make an accident.'
'Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.'
'I hope I never will,' she answered. 'I hate careless people. That's why I like you.'
Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
Since we first met I have loved you with whatever I had to love you with.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald
β
I do not want to live.
I want to love and then to live,
incidentally.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald
β
When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
β
Tom, I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
You are mysterious. I love you. Youβre beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and thatβs the rarest known combination.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Porcelain and Pink)
β
I still know in my heart that it is a Godless, dirty game; that love is bitter and all there is, and that the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth and is about the equivalent of people who stimulate themselves with dirty post cards-
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald
β
When you love someone, it's like building a library and filling the shelves. It doesn't matter how many years it's been since Austen wrote Emma or Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise. We can still pull them from the bookcases and dive back into the words, the same as they day they were written. All the years and memories are still right there, cataloged inside us.
β
β
Rachel Moore (The Library of Shadows)
β
slowly she spread her arms and stood there swan-like, radiating a pride in her young perfection that lit a warm glow in Carlyle's heart. "We're going through the black air with our arms wide," she called, "and our feet straight out behind like a dolphin's tail, and we're going to think we'll never hit the silver down there till suddenly it'll be all warm round us and full of little kissing, caressing waves." Then she was in the air, and Carlyle involuntarily held his breath. He had not realized that the dive was nearly forty feet. It seemed an eternity before he heard the swift compact sound as she reached the sea. And it was with his glad sigh of relief when her light watery laughter curled up the side of the cliff and into his anxious ears that he knew he loved her.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Offshore Pirate)
β
And now Rosalind enters. Rosalind is-- utterly Rosalind. She is one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them. Two types of men seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. All others are hers by natural prerogative.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
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.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
β
It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy--it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
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.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
As he put in his studs he realized that he was enjoying life as he would probably never enjoy it again. Everything was hallowed by the haze of his own youth. He had arrived, abreast of the best in his generation at Princeton. He was in love and his love was returned.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
Scott-there's nothing in the world I want but you-and your precious love. All the material things are nothing. I'd just hate to live in a sordid, colorless existence-because you'd soon love less-and less-and I'd do anything-anything-to keep your heart for my own-I don't want to live-I want to love first and live incidentally.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald
β
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.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
It was a morning for Ella Fitzgerald. There are fine things in the world, after all. Dignity, refinement, warmth and humour, where you'd never expect to find them. Even as an old woman, an amputee in a wheelchair, Ella sang like a girl who could still be at high school, falling in love for the first time".
β
β
David Mitchell (Ghostwritten)
β
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 daughterβ¦
Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.
Walking aloneβ¦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 with
Tapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
β
It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her - that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of oneβs self - that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (Save Me the Waltz)
β
See that little stream β we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it β a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.β
βWhy, theyβve only just quit over in Turkey,β said Abe. βAnd in Morocco ββ
βThatβs different. This western-front business couldnβt be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldnβt. 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 werenβt 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 fiancΓ©e, and little cafΓ©s in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfatherβs whiskers.β
βGeneral Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.β
βNo, he didnβt β he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle β there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender is the Night)
β
I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me was become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations β with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (On Booze (New Directions Pearls))
β
I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport.I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she didn't, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
No personality as strong as Zeldaβs could go without getting criticisms and as you say she is not above reproach. I've always known that. Any girl who gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has βkissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more,β cannot be considered beyond reproach even if above it. But Isabelle I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and itβs these things Iβd believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all that she should be.
But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and thatβs the beginning and end of everything. Youβre still a Catholic but Zeldaβs the only God I have left now.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
You and I have been happy; we havenβt been happy just once, weβve been happy a thousand times. The chances that spring, thatβs for everyone, like in the popular songs, may belong to us too β the chances are pretty bright at this time because as usual, I can carry most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand β and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and β I find it to be you and you onlyβ¦. Forget the past β what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven for ever and ever β even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you β turn gently in the waters through which you move and sail backβ¦
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)
β
The breathless idyl of their engagement gave way, first, to the intense romance of the more passionate relationship. The breathless idyl left them, fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day it and it was gone, how, they scarcely knew. Had either of them lost the other in the days of the idyl, the love lost would have been ever to the loser that dim desire without fulfillment which stands back of all life. But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain...
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound - something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness - and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
β
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'd been writing letters once a week and signing them: "Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
My story starts at sea, a perilous voyage to an unknown land. A shipwreck. The wild waters roar and heave. The brave vessel is dashed all to pieces. And all the helpless souls within her drowned. All save one. A lady. Whose soul is greater than the ocean, and her spirit stronger than the sea's embrace. Not for her a watery end, but a new life beginning on a stranger shore. It will be a love story. For she will be my heroine for all time. And her name will be Viola."
"She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself."
"He knew that there was passion there, but there was no shadow of it in her eyes or on her mouth; there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath. She clung nearer desperately and once more he kissed her and was chilled by the innocence of her kiss, by the glance that at the moment of contact looked beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world."
"Her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him."
"I used to build dreams about you."
"Then she kissed him until the sky seemed to fade out and all her smiles and tears to vanish in an ecstasy of eternal seconds.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
You see, when you were little they kept sending me snapβshots of you, first as a baby and then as a child in socks playing on the beach with a pail and shovel, and then suddenly as a wistful little girl with wondering, pure eyesβand I used to build dreams about you. A man has to have something living to cling to. I think, Lois, it was your little white soul I tried to keep near meβeven when life was at its loudest and every intellectual idea of God seemed the sheerest mockery, and desire and love and a million things came up to me and said: 'Look here at me! See, I'm Life. You're turning your back on it!' All the way through that shadow, Lois, I could always see your baby soul flitting on ahead of me, very frail and clear and wonderful.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Flappers and Philosophers)
β
Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible, with here and there a late-burning light β and suddenly out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a reverie of long days and nights, destined finally to go out into the dirty grey 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 Godβs dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shakenβ¦
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
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Will father be there?" she asked.
John turned to her in astonishment.
Your father is dead," he replied somberly. "Why should he go to Hades? You have it confused with another place that was abolished long ago."
After supper they folded up the table-cloth and spread their blankets for the night.
What a dream it was," Kismine sighed, gazing up at the stars. "How strange it seems to be here with one dress and a penniless fianc_!
Under the stars," she repeated. "I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth."
It was a dream," said John quietly. "Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness."
How pleasant then to be insane!"
So I'm told," said John gloomily. "I don't know any longer. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it." He shivered. "Turn up your coat collar, little girl, the night's full of chill and you'll get pneumonia. His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours."
So wrapping himself in his blanket he fell off to sleep.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Short Stories)