The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

What Amory did that year from early September to late in the spring was so purposeless and inconsecutive that it seems scarcely worth recording.

it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ—and once he was an organ-grinder!

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”