F. Scott Fitzgerald

He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.

December tumbled like a dead leaf from the calendar.

I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor

Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.

I'm a cynical idealist.' He paused and wondered if that meant anything.

He kissed her because it came about quite naturally; he found sweetness sleeping still upon her lips, and felt that he had never been away.

Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,
Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,
Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter…
Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.
Walking alone…was it splendor, or what, we were bound with?
Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?
Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground with
Tapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.

Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure.

There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.

The breathless idyl of their engagement gave way, first, to the intense romance of the more passionate relationship. The breathless idyl left them, fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day it and it was gone, how, they scarcely knew. Had either of them lost the other in the days of the idyl, the love lost would have been ever to the loser that dim desire without fulfillment which stands back of all life. But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain...

They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.

It takes two to make an accident.

She was beautiful — but especially she was without mercy. He must own that strength that could send him away.