Quotes from Tender Is the Night

“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“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, quote from Tender Is the Night

“I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“People living alone get used to loneliness.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“Someday I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but 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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.

My business is to tear them apart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this - so accidental - just when everything was going well.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“But I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

“the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night

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Popular quotes

“The Yaksha asked, 'What is weightier than the earth itself? What is higher than the heavens?' What is fleeter than the wind? And what is more numerous than grass?' Yudhishthira answered, 'The mother is weightier than the earth; the father is higher than the heaven; the mind is fleeter than the wind; and our thoughts are more numerous than grass.”
― C. Rajagopalachari, quote from Mahabharata

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“I've been learning this kind of thing," Tavi replied. "I can show you later. How did you steal all of that without learning how to open a lock?"
"I stole the keys," Katai said. "Obviously.”
― Jim Butcher, quote from Academ's Fury

“I looked up, my eyes pouring with tears of pain and understanding. I had to look away. I let my other hand slip from the rock and hang loose. “Don’t, Violet!” Lincoln’s voice was strong and unwavering. It caught me by surprise. “Don’t. You. Dare. Look at me!” It wasn’t compulsion, but I still couldn’t stop myself. I had to see him one last time. I opened my mouth to tell him good-bye, but he didn’t let me speak. “If you let go, I’m jumping in there after you!” My hand slipped in his hold and I did little to stop it, but he clung on. “It’s better this way, Linc! You can fight him without me and then you’ll be free!” He looked at me like I was mad until his jaw set with determination. “You smell of winter dew at the first crack of dawn and when you use your power, it feels like being submerged in the most intoxicating vanilla cream that I lose myself in it every time and…and you were beautiful,” he blurted out, catching us both by surprise. But he went on, ignoring the fact my hand was still slipping. “So stunning in that dress the other night, I could hardly look at you it hurt so much. You are the thing I dread the most in myself, Violet, because…I love you so much that I can’t trust myself. I’d die for you, give up all my power for you. I’d give you my soul in an instant, even if it meant I had to spend eternity in torment—just for one moment with you as mine. Wanting you consumes me. I dread you because I know the risk, but I’m so selfish, I want you anyway. I’d take you even though it could kill you.” I cried out again, the pain now so much worse, inside and out. My hand continued to slip as I looked into his eyes, intense with want, and I knew he was telling the truth. He would jump in after me. I forced my loose arm up and he grabbed it, leaning farther into the opening. He lifted me out and as he did, the severity of my burns became apparent. I couldn’t hold back the screams and he placed me belly down on the ground.”
― Jessica Shirvington, quote from Emblaze

“When a body succeeds in emitting or in reflecting luminous vibrations in a distinct and recognizable order--I thought--what does it do with these vibrations? Put them in its pocket? No, it releases them on the first passer-by. And how will the latter behave in the face of vibrations he can't utilize and which, taken in this way, might even be annoying? Hide his head in a hole? No, he'll thrust it out in that direction until the point most exposed to the optic vibrations becomes sensitized and develops the mechanism for exploiting them in the form of images. In short, I conceived of the eye-encephalon link as a kind of tunnel dug from the outside by the force of what was ready to become image, rather than from within by the intention of picking up any old image.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from Cosmicomics

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