This Side of Paradise

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas,

Not for a second do I regret being American—indeed, I think that a regret typical of very vulgar people, and I feel sure we are the great coming nation—yet”—and she sighed—“I

“You’re not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not,”

the lack of money to do the things one wants to makes one quite prosy and domestic,

“Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid,”

“I’m really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those people who have no interest in anything but their children.”

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

Sometimes I wish I’d been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy.

There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.

I hope something happens. I’m restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.

Sometimes when I’ve felt particularly radiant I’ve thought, why should this be wasted on one man?

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, every one knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same every one knows it’s because he can’t kiss her any more.

I love you—now.

You’d be dependent absolutely on a dreamer, a nice, well-born boy, but a dreamer—merely clever.

“Yet when I see a happy family it makes me sick at my stomach—” “Happy families try to make people feel that way,” said Tom cynically.

why am I a girl? Why am I not a stupid—? Look at you; you’re stupider than I am, not much, but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified—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 have to marry, that goes without saying.

“If there’s a God let him strike me—strike me!”

Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue.

“Misfortune is liable to make me a damn bad man,”

he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the result of circumstances and environment;

The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom.

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

Amory was alone—he had escaped from a small enclosure into a great labyrinth.

there were on the other hand sword-like pioneering personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan, Voltaire, who progressed much slower, yet eventually much further, not in the direct pessimistic line of speculative philosophy but concerned in the eternal attempt to attach a positive value to life.

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 . . . the invisible king—the élan vital—the principle of evolution . . . writing a book, starting a war, founding a school. . .

“Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.”

beware the artist who’s an intellectual also. The artist who doesn’t fit—the Rousseau, the Tolstoi, the Samuel Butler, the Amory Blaine—”

“When life gets hold of a brainy man of fair education,” began Amory slowly, “that is, when he marries he becomes, nine times out of ten, a conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned.

through a mixture of conditions of which the family is the first, there are these two sorts of brains. One sort takes human nature as it finds it, uses its timidity, its weakness, and its strength for its own ends. Opposed is the man who, being spiritually unmarried, continually seeks for new systems that will control or counteract human nature. His problem is harder. It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life. That is his struggle. He is a part of progress—the spiritually married man is not.”

if it were made illegal to have more than a certain amount the best men would all flock for the one other reward which attracts humanity—honor.”

The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way. We’ve made a world where that’s necessary.

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

“Listen to that! That’s what makes me discouraged with progress. Listen to that! I can name offhand over one hundred natural phenomena that have been changed by the will of man—a hundred instincts in man that have been wiped out or are now held in check by civilization. What this man here just said has been for thousands of years the last refuge of the associated muttonheads of the world. It negates the efforts of every scientist, statesman, moralist, reformer, doctor, and philosopher that ever gave his life to humanity’s service. It’s a flat impeachment of all that’s worth while in human nature.

“The theory that people are fit to govern themselves rests on this man. If he can be educated to think clearly, concisely, and logically, freed of his habit of taking refuge in platitudes and prejudices and sentimentalisms, then I’m a militant Socialist. If he can’t, then I don’t think it matters much what happens to man or his systems, now or hereafter.”

“Reform won’t catch up to the needs of civilization unless it’s made to.

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;

“I am selfish,” he thought. “This is not a quality that will change when I ‘see human suffering’ or ‘lose my parents’ or ‘help others.’ “This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part. “It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.

Inseparably linked with evil was beauty—beauty, still a constant rising tumult; soft in Eleanor’s voice, in an old song at night, rioting deliriously through life like superimposed waterfalls, half rhythm, half darkness. Amory knew that every time he had reached toward it longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of evil. Beauty of great art, beauty of all joy, most of all the beauty of women.

there was a certain intrinsic lack in those to whom orthodox religion was necessary,