F. Scott Fitzgerald

"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."

"The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly."

"Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction."

"I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - people didn't get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity."

"We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine."

"It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory."

"Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness."

"“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 romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won't.”"

"I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations -- with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country -- contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness -- hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day."

"I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds...it is an absolute fact---so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life."

"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."

"A fellow has to believe in something, Jay-such as the rottenness of humanity."

"I mean the women who, without any of the prerogatives of youth and beauty, demand continual slavery from their men... They sit back complacently and watch their husbands slave for them; and, without furnishing any of the pleasantries of life for their husbands, they demand the sort of continual attention that a charming fiancée might get... They are harridans and shrews who continually nag and scold until the men are driven idiotic."

"I am glad you are happy--but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life."

"I want excitement; and I don’t care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat."

"My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness."

"Courage is a sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things."

"Writers aren't exactly people... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person."

"The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it."

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."