F. Scott Fitzgerald

Yes, she was pretty, distinctly pretty; and to-night her face seemed really vivacious. She had that look that no woman, however histrionically proficient, can successfully counterfeit—she looked as if she were having a good time.

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.

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

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

There's a loneliness that only exists in one's mind. The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

You’ll understand why storms are named after people.

I love you and that's the beginning and end of everything.

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.

He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.

The loneliest moment in someones life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart and all they can do is stare blankly.

The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.

It's a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realized what's changed is you.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

There's no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it at all.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

For what it's worth, it's never too late to be whoever you want to be.

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want..

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

If you try to create a type you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual you may succeed at creating a type.

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn East and North toward them " this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

I love you and thats the beginning and end of everything.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.

Credit is something that should be given to others. If you are in a position to give credit to yourself then you do not need it.

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world havent had the advantages that youve had.

There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.

I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything.

I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

Very well then better a sane crook than a mad puritan.

There are no second acts in American lives.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

The great rich nation had made triumphant war, suffered enough for poignancy but not enough for bitterness - hence the carnival, the feasting, the triumph.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

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

Family quarrels are bitter things. They dont go according to any rules. Theyre not like aches or wounds theyre more like splits in the skin that wont heal because theres not enough material.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

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

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.

I hope you live a life you are proud of. If you find that you are not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.

No matter how low you go, there's always an unexplored basement.

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

It's a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known and even that is an understatement.

Action is character.

In any case, you must not confuse a single failure with a final defeat.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

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.

It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

It takes a genius to whine appealingly.

I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

Boredom is not an end product is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. Youve got to go by or past or through boredom as through a filter before the clear product emerges.

The victor belongs to the spoils.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.

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

Too much of anything is bad but too much Champagne is just right.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it's carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

Forgotten is forgiven.