Quotes from 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.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.

And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.

You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.

I don't care about truth. I want some happiness.

in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

And he could not tell why the struggle was worthwhile, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed... He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. I know myself, he cried, But that is all.

Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.