"This Side Of Paradise" by Scott Fitzgerald

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•           "Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a reverie of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. . . ."

•  "School ruined his French and gave him a distaste for standard authors."

• "It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being."

• "he was a slave to his own moods"

•           "your heart - you've probably been neglecting your heart - and you don't know"

• "his mind was so crowded with dreams"

• "Amory's mind turned inside out, a hundred of his theories confirmed, and his joy of life crystallized to a thousand ambitions."

• "social barriers as artificial distinctions made by the strong to bolster up their weak retainers and keep out the almost strong"

• "I can't drift--I want to be interested."

• "slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willows"

• "unable to bear walls"

• "Where now he realized only his own inconsequence, effort would make him aware of his own impotency and insufficiency."

• "He lacked somehow that intense animal magnetism that so often accompanies beauty in men or women; his personality seemed rather a mental thing, and it was not in his power to turn it on and off like a water-faucet."

• "The things Isabelle could do socially with one idea were remarkable."

• ""I've got an adjective that just fits you." This was one of his favorite starts--he seldom had a word in mind, but it was a curiosity provoker, and he could always produce something complimentary if he got in a tight corner."

• "you've gotten to mean to me a dream that I can't put on paper any more."

• "I'm sick of adapting myself to the local snobbishness of this corner of the world. I want to go where people aren't barred because of the color of their neckties and the roll of their coats."

• "it's hard to be made a cynic at twenty"

• "He lay awake in the darkness and wondered how much he cared--how much of his sudden unhappiness was hurt vanity--whether he was, after all, temperamentally unfitted for romance."

• "Each life unfulfilled, you see, It hangs still, patchy and scrappy; We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired--been happy."

• "as if I were a prize potato being fattened for a vegetable show."

• "His philosophy of success had tumbled down upon him, and he looked for the reasons."

• "You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to criticise don't blame yourself too much."

• "You used to stand out against 'people.' Success has completely conventionalized you."

• "The sense of going forward in a direct, determined line had come back; youth was stirring and shaking out a few new feathers."

• "You know you're perfectly effulgent."

• "Nobody seems to bore you," he objected. "About half the world do," she admitted, "but I think that's a pretty good average, don't you?"

• "Laughing lightning, color of rose."

• "You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination."

• "Oh, the enormous conceit of the man!"

• "I think the worst thing to contemplate is this--it's all happened before, how soon will it happen again?"

• "If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence."

• "The grass is full of ghosts to-night."

• "You know," whispered Tom, "what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years."

• "pale fires echo the night"

• "the splendor and the sadness of the world."

• "fat-paunched bundles of corruption, devoid of "both ideas and ideals"

• "This crisis-inspired religion is rather valueless and fleeting at best. I think four men have discovered Paris to one that discovered God."

• "I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic."

• "She is one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them. Two types of men seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty."

• "her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others"

• "The education of all beautiful women is the knowledge of men."

• "Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays."

• "Any one who marries me will have his hands full. I'm mean--mighty mean."

• "It may be an insane love-affair," she told her anxious mother, "but it's not inane."

• "in a sort of breathless hush, as if they feared that any minute the spell would break and drop them out of this paradise of rose and flame. But the spell became a trance, seemed to increase from day to day"

• "it seemed that he had closed the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of life."

• "She's life and hope and happiness, my whole world now."

• "It hurts when you reproach yourself for what you can't give me. I've got your precious self--and that's enough for me."

• "Beauty and love pass, I know. . . . Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses"

• "What power we have of hurting each other!"

• "For this is wisdom--to love and live, To take what fate or the gods may give, To ask no question, to make no prayer, To kiss the lips and caress the hair, Speed passion's ebb as we greet its flow, To have and to hold, and, in time--let go."

• "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. I don't want to think about pots and kitchens and brooms. I want to worry whether my legs will get slick and brown when I swim in the summer."

• "that required several cocktails "to come down to the intellectual level of the women present"

• "The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger"

• "A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big."

• "Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy."

• "Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it."

• "And I wish American novelists would give up trying to make business romantically interesting. Nobody wants to read about it, unless it's crooked business."

• "There was a tanging in the midnight air--silence was dead and sound not yet awoken--Life cracked like ice!--one brilliant note and there, radiant and pale, you stood . . . and spring had broken."

• "Beware of losing yourself in the personality of another being, man or woman."

• "I'm one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into men on such nights as these."

• "Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April."

• "scrap-book of his life"

• "To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him."

• "just people--too hot or too cold, tired, worried"

• "To-morrow I'm going to leave New York for good. It's a bad town unless you're on top of it."

• "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. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood--she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."

• "Life was a damned muddle . . . a football game with every one off-side and the referee gotten rid of--every one claiming the referee would have been on his side. . . ."

• "Progress was a labyrinth . . . people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it . . ."

• "Very few things matter and nothing matters very much."

• "He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want--not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable"

• "It seemed to me that the root of all the business I saw around me consisted in overworking and underpaying a bunch of dubs who submitted to it."

• "It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life."

• "Modern life," began Amory again, "changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before--populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and--we're dawdling along."

• "the one other reward which attracts humanity--honor."

• "That competitive instinct only wants a badge. If the size of their house is the badge they'll sweat their heads off for that. If it's only a blue ribbon, I damn near believe they'll work just as hard."

• "Socialism may not be progress, but the threat of the red flag is certainly the inspiring force of all reform. You've got to be sensational to get attention."

• "That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same."

• "These quarter-educated, stale-minded men such as your friend here, who think they think"

• "They haven't clear logical ideas on one single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all change. They don't think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won't see that if they don't pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we're going round and round in a circle."

• "in spite of going to college I've managed to pick up a good education."

• "A laissez-faire policy is like spoiling a child by saying he'll turn out all right in the end. He will--if he's made to."

• "I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation"

• "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."

• "Good luck to you and bad luck to your theories."

• "labyrinths which were, after all, the business of life"

• "The idea was strong in him that there was a certain intrinsic lack in those to whom orthodox religion was necessary"

• "Until the great mobs could be educated into a moral sense some one must cry: "Thou shalt not!"

• "covered with late-blooming, weepy watery-blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes"

• "If one can't be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to be a great criminal."

• "his ideas were still in riot"