He smiled understandingly--much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
Submitted on Friday, February 26, 2010 - 17:45 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:The Great Gatsby
Link to full quote: Quote #2484 from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
Submitted on Friday, December 25, 2009 - 02:40 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:This Side of Paradise
Link to full quote: Quote #2409 from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright, passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
Submitted on Friday, December 25, 2009 - 02:31 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:The Great Gatsby
Link to full quote: Quote #2406 from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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.
Submitted on Thursday, October 1, 2009 - 00:04 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:This Side of Paradise
Link to full quote: Quote #2362 from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In the dark cave of the taxi, fragrant with the perfume Rosemary had bought with Nicole, she came close again, clinging to him. He kissed her without enjoying it. He knew that there was passion there, but there was no shadow of it in her eyes or on her mouth; there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath. She clung nearer desperately and once more he kissed her and was chilled by the innocence of her kiss, by the glance that at the moment of contact looked beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world. She did not know yet that splendor is something in the heart; at the moment when she realized that and melted into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret.
Submitted on Sunday, August 2, 2009 - 14:23 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:Tender Is The Night
Link to full quote: Quote #2309 from Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
His eyes were focused upon a spot of brilliant color on the roof of a house farther down the alley.It was a girl in a red negligé, silk surely, drying her hair by the still hot sun of late afternoon. His whistle died upon the stiff air of the room; he walked cautiously another step nearer the window with a sudden impression that she was beautiful. ...He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful--then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:The Beautiful And The Damned
Link to full quote: Quote #2119 from The Beautiful And The Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Having gone through unprofessional agonies during her long relapse following Topsy's birth, he had, perforce, hardened himself about her, making a cleavage between Nicole sick and Nicole well. This made it difficult now to distinguish between his self-protective professional detachment and some new coldness in his heart. As an indifference cherished, or left to atrophy, becomes an emptiness, to this extent he had learned to become empty of Nicole, serving her against his will with negations and emotional neglect. 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.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:Tender Is The Night
Link to full quote: Quote #1747 from Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:The Great Gatsby
Link to full quote: Quote #1750 from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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 one fine morning --
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:The Great Gatsby
Link to full quote: Quote #1644 from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:The Great Gatsby
Link to full quote: Quote #1645 from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:The Great Gatsby
Link to full quote: Quote #1646 from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
'Her voice is full of money,' he said suddenly.
That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money - that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it...high in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:The Great Gatsby
Link to full quote: Quote #1647 from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
'Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?'
'Very much.'
'It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about -- things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.'
'You see I think everything's terrible anyhow,' she went on in a convinced way. 'Everybody thinks so -- the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.' Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. 'Sophisticated -- God, I'm so sophisticated!'
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:29 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:The Great Gatsby
Link to full quote: Quote #1357 from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
They had never been closer in their month of love nor communicated more profoundly with one another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:29 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:The Great Gatsby
Link to full quote: Quote #1318 from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:29 — GabrielleWho Said It?:F. Scott FitzgeraldSource:The Great Gatsby
Link to full quote: Quote #1004 from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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