The Beautiful and Damned
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Penguin Classics, 2004)
Every writer writes because it’s his mode of living.
Page 31.
Muddled optimism against organized dullness.
Page 34.
A classic … is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation.
Page 39.
I always believe anything anyone tells me about myself.
Page 50.
Unloved women have no biographies - they have histories.
Page 52.
I do nothing, for there’s nothing I can do that’s worth doing.
Page 53.
It always astonishes me when anybody does anything.
Page 54.
Only the romanticist preserves the things worth preserving.
Page 60.
You’re an ancient soul.
Page 63.
Beside her the two dozen school-girls and débutantes, young married women and waifs and strays whom he had known were so many females, in the word’s most contemptuous sense, breeders and bearers, exuding still that faintly odorous atmosphere of the cave and the nursery.
Page 85.
A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.
Page 92.
Inappropriate bourgeois teeth.
Page 128.
Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.
Page 138.
There’s no beauty without poignancy and there’s no poignancy without the feeling that it’s going, men, names, books, houses - bound for dust - mortal.
Page 138.
I’ve always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.
Page 186.
Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress.
Page 207.
There’s no lesson to be learned from life.
Page 209.
I was born tired.
Page 210.
Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. … Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which me measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.
Page 210.
Had he lost her he would have been a broken man, wretchedly and sentimentally absorbed in her memory for the remainder of life.
Page 225.
Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster.
Page 229.
I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.
Page 247.
They were always sorry for each other for the wrong things at the wrong times.
Page 251.
Compromising with events time moves along.
Page 296.
Every man is born a success, he makes himself a failure.
Page 308.
The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he’s succeeded, and the failure because he’s failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father’s good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father’s mistakes.
Page 340.