F. Scott Fitzgerald

They damned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them ‘clever.

At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.

I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.

My business is to tear them apart.

Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure.

"After the sureties of youth there sets in a period of intense and intolerable complexity. With the soda-jerker this period is so short as to be almost negligible. Men higher in the scale hold out longer in the attempt to preserve the ultimate niceties of relationship, to retain "impractical" ideas of integrity. But by the late twenties the business has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto been imminent and confusing has become gradually remote and dim. Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future - so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for rules of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic. It is left to the few to be persistently concerned with the nuances of relationships - and even this few only in certain hours especially set aside for the task."

"I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't repeat the past."

"Can't repeat the past? he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!

Oh, it doesn't get me. I'm pretty well cloistered, and I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway.

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

It makes me sad because I've never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.

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

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon,' cried Daisy, 'and the day after that, and the next thirty years?'

'Don't be morbid,' Jordan said. 'Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.'

'But it's so hot,' insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, 'And everything's so confused. Let's all go to town!

All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream

He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

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.