F. Scott Fitzgerald

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.

I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

Under the glass porte-cochère of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became grey and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxicabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day__ last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated a surrender with equanimity. Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him - like an actor kissed in a picture.

Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

We'll all be failures?""Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of - of ineffectual and sad, and - oh, how can I tell you?

She didn't like it," he said immediately."Of course she did.""She didn't like it," he insisted. "She didn't have a good time."He was silent and I guessed at his unutterable depression."I feel far away from her," he said. "It's hard to make her understand.""You mean about the dance?""The dance?" He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. "Old sport, the dance is unimportant.

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

He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't change the past.""Can't change the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!

I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't change the past.''Can't change the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that__ no matter__omorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning__o we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

...I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved - and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact - and rather deeply wise. More than that, what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Cather's: "We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.