Quotes from Flappers and Philosophers

“I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“I hate dainty minds,' answered Marjorie. 'But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“You remind me of a smoked cigarette.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“we both fitted. If our corners were not rubbed off they were at least pulled in. But deep in us both was something that made us require more for happiness. I didn't know what I wanted”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding-- it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“I don't want to sound like Pollyanna," she began, "but you haven't grasped me yet. My courage is faith- faith in the eternal resilience of me- that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide- not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often- and the female hell is deadlier than the male.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“I'm merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“What was it? Why won't you tell me?"
"I don't want to break down your illusions."
"My dear man, I have no illusions about you."
"I mean illusions about yourself.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea--if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“Girls like you are responsible for all the tiresome colorless marriages; all those ghastly inefficiencies that pass as feminine qualities. What a blow it must be when a man with imagination marries the beautiful bundle of clothes that he's been building ideals around, and finds that she's just a weak, whining, cowardly mass of affectations!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“To be afraid, a person has either to be very great and strong-- or else a coward. I'm neither.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“Oh, it doesn't get me. I'm pretty well cloistered, and I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“When I want something bad enough, common sense tells me to go and take it--and not get caught.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“Most of us are content to exist and breed and fight for the right to do both, and the dominant idea, the foredoomed attest to control one's destiny, is reserved for the fortunate or unfortunate few.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“We're going through the black air with our arms wide and our feet straight out behind like a dolphin's tail, and we're going to think we'll never hit the silver down there till suddenly it'll be all warm round us and full of little kissing, caressing waves.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“You see, when you were little they kept sending me snap–shots of you, first as a baby and then as a child in socks playing on the beach with a pail and shovel, and then suddenly as a wistful little girl with wondering, pure eyes—and I used to build dreams about you. A man has to have something living to cling to. I think, Lois, it was your little white soul I tried to keep near me—even when life was at its loudest and every intellectual idea of God seemed the sheerest mockery, and desire and love and a million things came up to me and said: 'Look here at me! See, I'm Life. You're turning your back on it!' All the way through that shadow, Lois, I could always see your baby soul flitting on ahead of me, very frail and clear and wonderful.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“No, no, it’s not me, it’s them—that old time that I’ve tried to have live in me. These were just men, unimportant evidently or they wouldn’t have been ‘unknown’; but they died for the most beautiful thing in the world—the dead South. You see,” she continued, her voice still husky, her eyes glistening with tears, “people have these dreams they fasten onto things, and I’ve always grown up with that dream. It was so easy because it was all dead and there weren’t any disillusions comin’ to me. I’ve tried in a way to live up to those past standards of noblesse oblige—there’s just the last remnants of it, you know, like the roses of an old garden dying all round us—streaks of strange courtliness and chivalry in some of these boys an’ stories I used to hear from a Confederate soldier who lived next door, and a few old darkies. Oh, Harry, there was something, there was something! I couldn’t ever make you understand but it was there.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“I thought you weren't afraid." "I never am --but I won't throw my life away just to show one man I'm not.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“Resignedly and with difficulty Tom removed the cigar—that is, he removed part of it, and then blew the remainder with a whut sound across the room, where it landed liquidly and limply in Mrs. Ahearn’s lap.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“My courage is faith—faith in the eternal resilience of me—that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I’ve got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide—not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I’ve been through hell without a whine quite often—and the female hell is deadlier than the male.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“Her sigh was a benediction—an ecstatic surety that she was youth and beauty now as much as she would ever know. For another instant life was radiant and time a phantom and their strength eternal—then there was a bumping, scraping sound as the rowboat scraped alongside. Up”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“That’s quite different. I told you I wouldn’t want to tie my life to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made any sweepin’ generalities.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“my yacht. I don’t mind going for a coupla hours’ cruise. I’ll even lend you that book so you’ll have something to read on the revenue”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“There’s a difference somewhere.” Being a supreme egotist Ardita frequently”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“Into a dozen minds entered a quick suspicion, a rumour of scandal. Could it be that behind the scenes with this couple, apparently so in love, lurked some curious antipathy? Why else this streak of fire across such a cloudless heaven?”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“Again the word was a prayer, incense offered up to a high God through this new and unfathomable darkness”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“I don't understand yet how it all happened.'

'Neither do I.' He smiled grimly. 'I guess these baby parties are pretty rough affairs.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

“You seem to be bankrupt - morally as well as financially”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers

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Popular quotes

“Do not call up that which you cannot put down.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

“If you've never done anything wrong it's probably because you have never tried anything new.”
― Albert Einstein, quote from Relativity: The Special and the General Theory

“My anxieties as to behavior are futile, ever more so, to infinity. If the other, incidentally or negligently, gives the telephone number of a place where he or she can be reached at certain times, I immediately grow baffled: should I telephone or shouldn't I? (It would do no good to tell me that I can telephone - that is the objective, reasonable meaning of the message - for it is precisely this permission I don't know how to handle.) What is futile is what apparently has and will have no consequence. But for me, an amorous subject, everything which is new, everything which disturbs, is received not as a fact but in the aspect of a sign which must be interpreted. From the lover's point of view, the fact becomes consequential because it is immediately transformed into a sign: it is the sign, not the fact, which is consequential (by its aura). If the other has given me this new telephone number, what was that the sign of? Was it an invitation to telephone right away, for the pleasure of the call, or only should the occasion arise, out of necessity? My answer itself will be a sign, which the other will inevitably interpret, thereby releasing, between us, a tumultuous maneuvering of images. Everything signifies: by this proposition, I entrap myself, I bind myself in calculations, I keep myself from enjoyment.
Sometimes, by dint of deliberating about "nothing" (as the world sees it), I exhaust myself; then I try, in reaction, to return -- like a drowning man who stamps on the floor of the sea -- to a spontaneous decision (spontaneity: the great dream: paradise, power, delight): go on, telephone, since you want to! But such recourse is futile: amorous time does not permit the subject to align impulse and action, to make them coincide: I am not the man of mere "acting out" -- my madness is tempered, it is not seen; it is right away that I fear consequences, any consequence: it is my fear -- my deliberation -- which is "spontaneous.”
― Roland Barthes, quote from A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“And though the clapping came from the family and friends that filled the church, she was sure she heard a distant clapping, too. A clapping of all the angels in heaven and earth who knew that a moment like this could only come from one source. Their loving, faithful Almighty God.”
― Karen Kingsbury, quote from Reunion

“America's industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and many more based in dynastic wealth of essentially inexhaustible proportions. John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today's money, and paid no income tax. No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America. Congress tried to introduce an income tax of 2 percent on earnings of $4,000 in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Income tax wouldn't become a regular part of American Life until 1914. People would never be this rich again.
Spending all this wealth became for many a more or less full-time occupation. A kind of desperate, vulgar edge became attached to almost everything they did. At one New York dinner party, guests found the table heaped with sand and at each place a little gold spade; upon a signal, they were invited to dig in and search for diamonds and other costly glitter buried within. At another party - possibly the most preposterous ever staged - several dozen horses with padded hooves were led into the ballroom of Sherry's, a vast and esteemed eating establishment, and tethered around the tables so that the guests, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, could enjoy the novel and sublimely pointless pleasure of dining in a New York ballroom on horseback.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from At Home: A Short History of Private Life

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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