F. Scott Fitzgerald

Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.

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.

I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.

She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game

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

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

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

Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" 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.

Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.

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

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

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

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

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.

We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical ill-considered criticism.

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

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.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.