“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“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 eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as 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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“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 like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“It takes two to make an accident.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
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—to-morrow 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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
“Ah," she cried, "you look so cool."
Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.
You always look so cool," she repeated.
She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Born place: in St. Paul, Minnesota, The United States
Born date September 24, 1896
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“Deep down, people who deliberately distribute other people’s music and stuff feel contempt for professionals. And it’s not just culture — these days lots of people are contemptuous of everything. Without realizing it, they’re searching for things to despise.”
― Fuminori Nakamura, quote from Evil and the Mask
“Her checkbook catches his eye. He takes it and hides it in the back of the freezer, underneath a bag of frozen lima beans. If she can freeze his account, he can freeze hers.”
― Mary Amato, quote from Guitar Notes
“I'd had my suspicions, but they couldn't have prepared me for the truth.”
― Amanda Sun, quote from Ink
“Land and sea.
We may think of them as opposites; as complements. But there is a difference in how we think of them; the sea, and the land.
If we are walking around in a forest, a meadow or a town, we see our surroundings as being made up of individual elements. There are many different kinds of trees in varying sizes, those buildings, these streets. The meadow, the flowers, the bushes. Our gaze lingers on details, and if we are standing in a forest in the autumn, we become tongue-tied if we try to describe the richness around us. All this exists on land.
But the sea. The sea is something completely different. The sea is one.
We may note the shifting moods of the sea. What the sea looks like when the wind is blowing, how the sea plays with the light, how it rises and falls. But still it is always the sea we are talking about. We have given different parts of the sea different names for navigation and identification, but if we are standing before the sea, there is only one whole. The Sea.
If we are taken so far out in a small boat that no land is visible in any direction, we may catch sight of the sea. It is not a pleasant experience. The sea is a god, an unseeing, unhearing deity that does not even know we exist. We mean less than a grain of sand on an elephant's back, and if the sea wants us, it will take us. That's just the way it is. The sea knows no limits, makes no concessions. It has given us everything and it can take everything away from us.
To other gods we send our prayer: Protect us from the sea.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbor
“هناك طريقتان لرؤية المدن، الأولى الخاصة بالسائح الأجنبي الذي وصل حديثاً، والذي ينظر إلى البنايات والأنصبة التذكارية والطرق الواسعة والآفاق من الخارج. هناك أيضا النظرة الداخلية، مدينة الغرف التي فيها نمنا والممرات ودور السينما والفصول الدراسية القديمة، المدينة المكونة من الروائح والأضواء والألوان التي تشكل أغلى ذكرياتنا. وبالنسبة لهؤلاء الذين يرونها من الخارج، يمكن أن تبدو مدينة ما مشابهة كثيراً لأخرى، ولكن الذاكرة الجماعية لمدينة ما هي روحها، وأطلالها هي الشاهد الأكثر بلاغة على تلك الروح.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from Other Colors: Essays and A Story
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The Sun and Her Flow...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.
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