This Side of Paradise Quotes

“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, This Side of Paradise

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, 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, 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, This Side of Paradise

“I'm a cynical idealist.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, This Side of Paradise

“Life cracked like ice!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, 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, This Side of Paradise

“There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot;
there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth-yet the
waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a
love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized
dreams......
And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had
determined to use to 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, This Side of Paradise

“Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and café, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he pondered o'er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death:
"Thru Time I'll save my love!" he said. . . yet Beauty vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead. . .
-Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair:
"Who'd learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet there". . . So all my words, however true, might sing you to a thousandth June, and no one ever know that you were Beauty for an afternoon.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, 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, This Side of Paradise

“I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, 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, This Side of Paradise

“First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormous
quantity of it, and that it roared and roared-really all the banalities
about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then
that these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I know myself," he cried, "but that is all-”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, 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, This Side of Paradise

“Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen...”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he'd kissed a girl, everyone knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same, everyone knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“The grass is full of ghosts tonight.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.' They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees. '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.' ...
And what we leave here is more than class; it's the whole heritage of youth. We're just one generation-- we're breaking all the links that seemed to bind us her to top-booted and high-stocked generations. We've walked arm and arm with Burr and Light-Horse Harry Lee through half these deep-blue nights.' 'That's what they are,' Tom tangented off, 'deep-blue-- a bit of color would spoil them, make them exotic.' Spries, against a sky that's a promise of dawn, and blue light on the slate roofs-- it hurts... rather--' 'Good-by, Aaron Burr,' Amory called toward deserted Nassau Hall, 'you and I knew strange corners of life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, 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, This Side of Paradise

“sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“he wanted people to like his mind again-after awhile it might be such a nice place in which to live.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as inevitably his-- the pageantry and carnival of rich dusk and dim streets... it seemed that he had closed the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of life. Everywhere these countless lights, this promise of a night of streets and singing-- he moved in a half-dream through the crowd as if expecting to meet Rosalind hurrying toward him with eager feet from every corner... How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his. Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds upon the summer air.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“...I feared so-you're sentimental. You're not like me. I'm a romantic little materialist."

"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, This Side of Paradise

“I'm very damn wet!' he said aloud to the sundial.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“he could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and contour.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“He lifted his arms to the crystaline, radiant sky.
"I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“What a wonderful song, she thought-everything was wonderful tonight, most of all this romantic scene in the den with their hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm limousines and in low cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering trees-only the boy might change, and this one was so nice.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“For years afterwards when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“When Eleanor's arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her-- she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise