Tender is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Penguin, 1986)
Rosemary thought she would not like to have Nicole for an enemy.
Page 29.
I’m a mean, hard woman.
Page 29.
He went into the dressing tent and inspired a commotion by appearing in a moment clad in transparent black lace drawers. Close inspection revealed that actually they were lined with flesh-colored cloth.
Page 30.
You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.
Page 30.
I love him, Mother. I’m desperately in love with him - I never knew I could feel that way about anybody. And he’s married, and I like her too - it’s just hopeless.
Page 31.
As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.
Page 32.
Death beds make people tired indeed.
Page 34.
He had many mechanical devices.
Page 36.
This excitement about things reached an intensity out of proportion to their importance, generating a really extraordinary virtuosity with people.
Page 36.
“New friends,” he said, as if it were an important point, “can often have a better time together than old friends.”
Page 40.
Whatever happens it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl.
Page 50.
He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.
Page 58.
Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel.
Page 68.
They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other.
Page 86.
I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.
Page 93.
It was often easier to give a show than to watch one.
Page 101.
Oh, we’re such actors - you and I.
Page 118.
Holding lost times and future hopes.
Page 151.
She brought out her accomplishments for his approval.
Page 158.
Mountain-climbing cars are built on a slant similar to the angle of a hat-brim of a man who doesn’t want to be recognized.
Page 163.
It’s a confession of weakness for a scientist not to write.
Page 178.
So many of the important times in life begin by seeming incidental.
Page 181.
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
Page 185.
A man is vulnerable only in his pride, but delicate as Humpty Dumpty once that is meddled with.
Page 193.
Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves.
Page 193.
If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.
Page 196.
The absurdity of the story rested in the immaturity of the attitude combined with the sophisticated method of its narration.
Page 196.
It’s always a delusion when I see what you don’t want me to see.
Page 209.
Being alone in body and spirit begets loneliness, and loneliness begets more loneliness.
Page 222.
The best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.
Page 227.
She wanted to be taken and she was, and what had begun with a childish infatuation on a beach was accomplished at last.
Page 233.
Dick gave her a version of the facts.
Page 233.
You try to find the right personality to handle a particular case.
Page 233.
Dicks discovery that he was not in love with her, nor she with him, had added to rather than diminished his passion for her. Now that he knew he would not enter further into her life, she became the strange woman for him. He supposed many men meant no more than that when they said they were in love.
Page 236.
Some day I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.
Page 237.
Youth called to youth.
Page 238.
She had achieved the elusiveness that gives hidden significance to the least significant remarks.
Page 239.
She smiled at him again with an invitation he understood, that denied the flesh even in the act of tendering it.
Page 242.
So easy to be loved - so hard to love.
Page 266.
It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life - it can be a superabundance of interest.
Page 278.
You used to want to create things - now you seem to want to smash them up.
Page 287.
I only know what I see in the cinema.
Page 290.
I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.
Page 295.
Nicole had been designed for change, for flight, with money as fins and wings.
Page 301.
He was seeking is children, not protectively but for protection.
Page 301.
Women marry all their husbands’ talents and naturally, afterwards, are not so impressed with them as they may keep up the pretense of being.
Page 304.
It’s hard to go on liking people who don’t like you.
Page 309.
It was lonely and sad to be so empty-hearted toward each other.
Page 312.
Whereas a girl of nineteen draws her confidence from a surfeit of attention, a woman of twenty-nine is nourished on subtler stuff.
Page 313.
It is hard for those who have once been mentally afflicted to be sorry for those who are well.
Page 323.
He had long concluded that certain classes of English people lived upon a concentrated essence of the anti-social that, in comparison, reduced the gorgings of New York to something like a child contracting indigestion from ice cream.
Page 326.
He took a step after her and swiftly planted his little foot in the most celebrated of targets.
Pages 328-329.
I never did go in for making love to dry loins.
Page 333.
When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.
Page 335.
All people want is to have a good time and if you make them unhappy you cut yourself off from nourishment.
Page 336.