27 Quotes Tagged: fitzgerald

You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.

I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.

Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.

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-

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

Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.

She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.

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.

You've got an awfully kissable mouth.

Never miss a party...good for the nerves — like celery.

Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.

Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.

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.