Quotes from F Scott Fitzgerald

On the centre of the lake, cooled by the piercing current of the Rhône, lay the true centre of the Western World. Upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty.

Oh, blessed are the simple rich, for they inherit the earth!

He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.

Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the supposition of a previous perfect faith. Does that fix it?

Charley was twenty-six, with that faint musk of weakness hanging about him that is often mistaken for the scent of evil.

What are you looking at? I was just thinking that you're going to be rather happy. Nicole was frightened: Am I? All right--things couldn't be worse than they have been.

He was born sleepless without a talent for rest or the desire for it. --Cecelia Brady about Stahr

You were brought up to work--not especially to marry. Now you've found your first nut to crack and it's a good nut--go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him-- whatever happens it can't spoil you because economically you're a boy, not a girl.

All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love.

One of the pilots asked Mr. Smith if he liked his business, and Mr. Smith said, Sure. Sure I like it. It's nice being the only sound nut in a hatful of cracked ones. ---Stewardess to Cecelia Brady

They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm as June, and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he must speak. 'I think,' he said and his voice trembled, 'that if I lost faith in you I'd lose faith in God.' She looked at him with such a started face that he asked her the matter. 'Nothing,' she said slowly, 'only this: five men have said that to me before, and it frightens me.

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had.