F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

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She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses—bound for dust—mortal—

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped form him - as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
To create souls in men, to create fine happiness and fine despair she must remain deeply proud - proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, to be passionate and possessed.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
In crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and—and in love before they're born.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
A man's social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he's succeeded, and the failure because he's failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father's good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father's mistakes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald