"If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time."
— Edith Wharton

"Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair."
— Edith Wharton

"My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet."
— Edith Wharton

"His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen."
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled dreams of an inarticulate lifetime."
— Edith Wharton

"The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation."
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
— Oscar Wilde

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
— Oscar Wilde

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
— Oscar Wilde

"I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."
— Oscar Wilde

"I never travel without my diary. One must always have something sensational to read on the train."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"No good deed goes unpunished."
— Oscar Wilde

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
— Oscar Wilde

"Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do."
— Oscar Wilde

"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)"
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windemere's Fan)

"Youth is wasted on the young."
— Oscar Wilde

"The world is a stage and the play is badly cast."
— Oscar Wilde

"Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative."
— Oscar Wilde

"With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy? "
— Oscar Wilde

"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius."
— Oscar Wilde

"Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer."
— Oscar Wilde

"One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead"
— Oscar Wilde

"We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell."
— Oscar Wilde

"A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company."
— Oscar Wilde

"I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)

"Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"There must have been moments even that afternoon whe 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 (The Great Gatsby)

"Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)

"And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (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 external 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."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (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 (The Great Gatsby)

"I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"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 (This Side of Paradise)

"For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (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 (The Great Gatsby)

"The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)

"'Think how you love me,' she whispered. 'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.'

'You'll always be like this to me.'

'Oh no; but promise me you'll remember.' Her tears were falling. 'I'll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight.'"
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Magnetism)

"There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…"
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I want leisure to read—an immense amount."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection)

""...for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.""
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"Murder your darlings. "
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)