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

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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
And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

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

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
Her beautiful eyes and lips were very grave as she made her choice, and Anthony thought again how naive was her every gesture; she took all the things of life for hers to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.

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
He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He was figuratively following along beside her as she walked the fence, ready to catch her if she should fall.

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
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
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
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
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
I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe - and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you—it's a wall that an active you runs up against.

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
Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know—because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

F. Scott Fitzgerald