F. Scott Fitzgerald · 288 pages
Rating: (50.3K votes)
“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won't.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“You'll find another.'
God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“And he could not tell why the struggle was worthwhile, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed...
He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.
I know myself," he cried, "But that is all.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“I can’t tell you just how wonderful she is. I don’t want you to know. I don’t want any one to know.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical ill-considered criticism.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...It has no day.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation-with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafés in Mont Marte, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
“He's sensitive and I don't want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn't care about him.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Born place: in St. Paul, Minnesota, The United States
Born date September 24, 1896
See more on GoodReads
“But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
“At the base of the immense pillar, tiny Babylon was in shadow. Then the darkness climbed the tower, like a canopy unfurling upward. It moved slowly enough that Hillalum felt he could count the moments passing, but then it grew faster as it approached, until it raced past them faster than he could blink, and they were in twilight... For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.”
― Ted Chiang, quote from Stories of Your Life and Others
“Over the obsidian hills and the sunken yellow dale, through the vast oceans of fog and the fires of nevermore, sits the fickle doors of the land of twilight. I will traverse it all, and execute righteous judgment on all that oppose me.”
― H.S. Crow, quote from Lunora and the Monster King
“Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.”
― Rebecca Solnit, quote from Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
“Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there's immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years. And who were the immigrants? Those in the settled world who were cranks, malcontents, restless, heretical, black sheep, hyperactive, hypomanic, misanthropic, itchy, unconventional, yearning to be rich, yearning to be out of their damn boring repressive little hamlet, yearning. Couple that with the second reason - for the majority of its colonial and independent history, America has had a moving frontier luring those whose extreme prickly optimism made merely booking passage to the New World insufficiently novel - and you've got America the individualistic.
Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family's rice. The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it withe slavery.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, quote from Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Best Little Witch-Ho...
I, Partridge: We Nee...
Non Friction
The Unidentified Red...
Equal of the Sun
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.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
