F. Scott Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise (1920)

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She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire's bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush-these alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth-bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love's exaltation.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he'd kissed a girl, everyone knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same, everyone knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You are mine-you know you're mine!" he cried wildly...the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened...the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
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-

F. Scott Fitzgerald
My imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Never walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is your most vulnerable part-once in bed, you're safe; he may lie around under the bed all night, but you're safe as daylight. If you still have doubts pull the blanket over your head.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Modern life... changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before-populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and-we're dawdling along. My idea is that we've got to go very much faster.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into men on such nights as these. I have the social courage to go on the stage, but not the energy; I haven't the patience to write books; and I never met a man I'd marry. However, I'm only eighteen.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Beware the artist who's an intellectual also. The artist who doesn't fit.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm restless. My whole generation is restless. I'm sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer. Even if I had no talents I'd not be content to work ten years, condemned either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give some man's son an automobile.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There's so much spring in the air- there's so much lazy sweetness in your heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and café, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last; a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen...

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

F. Scott Fitzgerald