F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

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

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.

You remind me of a smoked cigarette.

I want to do everything in the world with you.

You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.

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.

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

The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes.

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.

Her love had reached a point where now at last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate.

The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the last edge of twilight. The early moon had drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful.

"Want any of this stuff? Jordan?... Nick?"
I didn't answer.
Nick?" he asked again.
What?"
Want any?"
No... I just remembered that today's my birthday."
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.

"What are you going to do?

"Can't say - run for president, write -"

"Greenwich Village?"

"Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

" — I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires — —
"You are not!" She brought one little fist down onto the other. "You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.