Scott Quotes

When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

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

I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

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.

Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

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

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

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.

What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.

Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.

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.

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

I love you like a fat kid loves cake!

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

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.

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.

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

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

The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.

Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

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

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

I love books. I like that the moment you open one and sink into it you can escape from the world, into a story that's way more interesting that yours will ever be.

I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.

Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.

There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.

Those sweet lips. My, oh my, I could kiss those lips all night long. Good things come to those who wait.

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

You'll find another.' God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

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

If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.

I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.

I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go

Revenge, the sweetest morsel to the mouth that ever was cooked in hell.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

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

He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.

You see, freedom has a way of destroying things.

The human body is the best work of art.

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.

He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.

All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.

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

It takes two to make an accident.

Nature didn't need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

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.

A fit, healthy body—that is the best fashion statement

Oh, what a tangled web we weave...when first we practice to deceive.

There’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated.

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

I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.

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.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him

I felt like an animal, and animals don’t know sin, do they?

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.

Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.

I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.

If you want to write a negative review, don't tickle me gently with your aesthetic displeasure about my work. Unleash the goddamn Kraken." [on Twitter, July 17, 2012]

Ethan Wyeth: I hope you're thirsty." Gideon Wyeth:"Why?" Ethan: "Cause your dumb and ugly, but I can do something about thirsty.

Things end. People leave. And you know what? Life goes on. Besides, if bad things didn't happen, how would you be able to feel the good ones?

He inclined his head at my dress. "What's the occasion?" "Homecoming," I said, twirling. "Like?" "Last I heard, Homecoming requires a date." "About that," I hedged. "I'm sort of...going with Scott. We both figure a high-school dance is the last place Hank will be patrolling." Patch smiled, but it was tight. "I take that back. If Hank wants to shoot Scott, he has my blessing.

There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.

As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.

Don't try to win over the haters; you are not a jackass whisperer.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.

I don't care if I pass your test, I don't care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly - I'll beat you unfairly first. - Ender

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.

Fine! I'll throw on some clothes. Turn around. I'm in my pj's" "I'm a guy. That's like asking a kid not to glance at the candy counter.

Someday, Locke Lamora,” he said, “someday, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I’m still around to see it.” “Oh please,” said Locke. “It’ll never happen.

...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

I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

And in the end, we were all just humans, drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.

A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.

Remember, the enemy's gate is down.

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.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. 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—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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.

V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.

No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction

For what it’s worth... it’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.