F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
24 quotes
"Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on - I've seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have been hung — glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them."
"Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain."
"What are you going to do? "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink."
"my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me."
"You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me."
"Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food."
"The sea, he thought, had treasured it's memories deeper than the faithless land."
"Beauty and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-"
"Always, after he was in bed, there were voices - indefinite, fading, enchanting - just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorites waking dreams."
"Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable."
"If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence."
"Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren't just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children."
"All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else's clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams."
"Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood - she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."
"Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again."
"He was good looking, "sort of distinguished when he wants to be", had a line, and was properly inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environment led her to desire"
"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."
"Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood, she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."
"Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness."
"C'mon, Amory. Your romance is overYou don't know how true you spoke. No idea. 'At's the whole trouble"
"There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes..."
"This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.It is somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life."
"We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...It has no day."
"Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter…Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.Walking alone…was it splendor, or what, we were bound with?Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground withTapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air."