The collection / 324 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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324 results · Page 7 of 14Play this collection ▷

01c. 1918 AD

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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02c. 1918 AD

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!

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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03c. 1918 AD

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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04c. 1918 AD

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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05c. 1918 AD

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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06c. 1918 AD

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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07c. 1918 AD

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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08c. 1918 AD

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?

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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09c. 1918 AD

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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10c. 1918 AD

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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11c. 1918 AD

I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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12c. 1918 AD

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’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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13c. 1918 AD

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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14c. 1918 AD

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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15c. 1918 AD

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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16c. 1918 AD

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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17c. 1918 AD

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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18c. 1918 AD

I just think of people," she continued, "whether they seem right where they are and fit into a picture. I don't mind if they don't do anything. I don't see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when people do anything.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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19c. 1918 AD

Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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20c. 1918 AD

After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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21c. 1918 AD

The present was the thing--work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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22c. 1918 AD

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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23c. 1918 AD

That most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man".

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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24c. 1918 AD

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

F. Scott Fitzgerald / quote

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