F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

"If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns at the end of your dock."
Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to him, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted things had diminished by one.

"Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

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.

If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.

She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

You know, you’re a little complicated after all.”
“Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really - I’m just a - I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.

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.

When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.

I’m not sure what I’ll do, but — well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.