This Side of Paradise

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

swards,

paean

ennui.

soupçon

ingenue

guile

inviolate

halcyon

dissipate

stolid

priggish.

stolidity,

dilettantism.

stultify

effulgent.”

picayune

This crisis-inspired religion is rather valueless and fleeting at best.

tulle,

chemises

dowager

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.

bouleversement

vacuity.

Lethe.

garrulous.

ingots

the idea that men can stand anything if they get used to it,

ennui

“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”

I see I am starting wrong. Let me begin again.

“But I have to have a soul,” he objected. “I can’t be rational—and I won’t be molecular.”

and here am I with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If I were born a hundred years from now, well and good, but now what’s in store for me—I

calomel

opalescent;

The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

querulous

fiat

flaneurs

which is that man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

syllogisms.

mitre,

hirsute

conic

acerbity,

He felt that he was leaving behind him his chance of being a certain type of artist. It seemed so much more important to be a certain sort of man.