4 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes on Reality

F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes on reality

17. It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

31. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows. This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch-not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward-a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.

56. There is a sort of waking nightmare that sets in sometimes when one has missed a sleep or two, a feeling that comes with extreme fatigue and a new sun, that the quality of the life around has changed. It is a fully articulate conviction that somehow the existence one is then leading is a branch shoot of life and is related to life only as a moving picture or a mirror-that the people, and streets, and houses are only projections from a very dim and chaotic past.

87. The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.