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One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Tender Is the Night
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.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, This Side of Paradise
We are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity--we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Tender Is the Night
Idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them -- their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, letter to his daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, Jul. 7, 1938
Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Tender Is the Night
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby
The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, This Side of Paradise
No Achilles' heel ever toughened by itself. It just gets more and more vulnerable.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, letter to "Scottina" Fitzgerald, June 12, 1940
I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, This Side of Paradise
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, This Side of Paradise
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby
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