Best 38 quotes in «fitzgerald quotes» category

As Henry Dan Piper, one of Fitzgerald's most perceptive critics, has commented, his fiction heroes "are destroyed because they attempt to fulfill themselves through their social relationships. They cannot distinguish between social values like popularity, charm, and success, and the more lasting moral values." Their creator did make that distinction, however, and so was constantly surrounding his characters with a mist of admiration and then blowing it away.

Afterwards, he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.

Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.

A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. ...He aspires to create new and original works. His way is alone. If he succumbs to ideologies, he turns into a mouthpiece. He must hang on to his identity for dear life. In the end he must rely on his own judgment. It’s the only way to survive as a writer and an artist.

Do you read them? Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald?" "Only if I have to. I try to avoid old dead white men.

An ardent anti-Nazi, he was excited by the outbreak of World War II---which he had been predicting---and followed the war news closely. [On F. Scott Fitzgerald]

Douăzeci și cinci e prea cinică și sofisticată; treizeci e numai bună pentru paloarea excesului de muncă; patruzeci e vârsta poveștilor lungi, care durează cît un trabuc fumat în întregime; șaizeci e... ah, șaizeci e prea aproape de șaptezeci; dar cincizeci e cu adevărat floarea vîrstei. O ador.

Fitzgerald's attachment to those who had shared his time and experience here on earth, his sense of identity with them, his caring---that is perhaps the final burden and beauty of these letters.

Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' and it's sad, gay nostalgia.

He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want -- not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable...'very few things matter and nothing matters very much

Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.

He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful — then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.

In an inexplicable way he was quite different from anyone else....He was smallish, neat, solidly built....Possibly he was a man who at once became self-conscious before a camera. Even snapshots tend to give him an air of swagger, a kind of cockiness he did not possess at all. [On. F. Scott Fitzgerald]

Încercăm să ne alegem mijloacele și apoi luăm ce putem – și ne mai și bucurăm.

He cared only about people; he was scarcely conscious of places except for their weather, until they had been invested with color by tangible events.

I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual «There!» yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which 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.

Is your generation so soft that they talk of going to pieces if life doesn't always present itself in terms of beautiful, easy decisions?

Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

It may be that The Great Gatsby is as perfect, word for word, just in terms of English; but Ulysses is deeper, richer, wider – and is comic, whereas The Great Gatsby is a tragic novel. And I think all great art is comic art. (video)

Nobody seems to bore you," he objected "About half the world do," she admitted, "but I think that’s a pretty good average, don’t you?" and she turned to find something in Browning that bore on the subject. She was the only person he ever met who could look up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of conversation, and yet not be irritating to distraction. She did it constantly, with such serious enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching her golden hair bent over a book, brow wrinkled so little at hunting her sentence.

My hair-- bob it!

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work-the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside-the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once.

She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.

The Bright Young People. The press love and hate them - they celebrate them, they vilify them, and they know full well that they would not shift nearly so many papers without them.

My courage is faith--faith in the eternal resilience of me--that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide--not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often--and the female hell is deadlier than the male.

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

Spend the glittering moonlight there Pursuing down the soundless deep Limbs that gleam and shadowy hair, Or floating lazy, half-asleep. Dive and double and follow after, Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call, With lips that fade, and human laughter And faces individual, Well this side of Paradise! . . . There's little comfort in the wise.

The grass is full of ghosts tonight.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.' They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees. 'You know,' whispered Tom, 'what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years.

The price for his intactness was incompleteness.

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.

This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.

We couldn't go on indefinitely being swept off our feet.

You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.

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.

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.

Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

You've got an awfully kissable mouth.