Quotes from F Scott Fitzgerald

he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved. So it had been. So it would ever be…

You said a bad driver is only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.

After marriage came elation, and then, gradually, the growth of weariness. Responsibility descended upon Merlin, the responsibility of making his thirty dollars a week and her twenty suffice to keep them respectably fat and to hide with decent garments the evidence that they were.

Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness.

And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.

While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little now and then with gusts of emotion.

Like so many men he had found that he had only one or two ideas - that his little collection of pamphlets now in its fiftieth German edition contained the germ of all he would ever think or know.

A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle —

a negligée of robin's-egg blue laid out upon the bed diffused a faint perfume, elusive and familiar. On a chair were a pair of stockings and a street dress; an open powder box yawned upon the bureau. She had gone out.

Forgotten is forgiven.

My own rule is to let everything alone.