Quotes from F Scott Fitzgerald

He stretched out his arms towards the dark water in a curious way, and,far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling involuntarily I glanced seaward - and distinguishing nothing except a single green light, minute and faraway, that might have been the end of a dock.

It'd be a good setting to jump overboard,' said Dick mildly. 'Wouldn't it?' agreed Nicole hastily. 'Let's borrow life-preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.

no girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it's every girl for herself.

When people have so much for outsiders didn't it indicate a lack of inner intensity?

This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and riding smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

I matched my grey eyes against his brown ones for guile, my young golf-and-tennis heart-beats against his, which must be slowing a little after years of over-work. And I planned and I contrived and I plotted - any woman can tell you - but it never came to anything, as you will see. I still like to think that if he'd been a poor boy and nearer my age I could manage it, but of course the real truth was that I had nothing to offer that he didn't have.

Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss anyone; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide somewhere safe out of sight, up in the corner of his mind.

It was astonishing to think that life had once been the sum of her current love-affairs. It was now the sum of her current problems.

He drew her very tenderly close and their lips met like starved hearts.

At both ends of life man needed nourishment: a breast - a shrine. Something to lay himself beside when no one wanted him further, and shoot a bullet into his head.

Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.

An idea ran backward and forward in his head like a blind man, knocking over the solid furniture.