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There’s A Writer For You,” He Said. “knows Everything And At The Same Time He Knows Nothing.” [narrator]it Was My First Inkling That He Was A Writer. And While I Like Writers—because If You Ask A Writer Anything You Usually Get An Answer—still It Belittled Him In My Eyes. Writers Aren’t People Exactly. Or, If They’re Any Good, They’re A Whole Lot Of People Trying So Hard To Be One Person. It’s Like Actors, Who Try So Pathetically Not To Look In Mirrors. Who Lean Backward Trying—only To See Their Faces In The Reflecting Chandeliers.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

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There’s A Writer For

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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There’s A Writer For You,” He Said. “knows Everything And At The Same Time He Knows Nothing.” [narrator]it Was My First Inkling That He Was A Writer. And While I Like Writers—because If You Ask A Writer Anything You Usually Get An Answer—still It Belittled Him In My Eyes. Writers Aren’t People Exactly. Or, If They’re Any Good, They’re A Whole Lot Of People Trying So Hard To Be One Person. It’s Like Actors, Who Try So Pathetically Not To Look In Mirrors. Who Lean Backward Trying—only To See Their Faces In The Reflecting Chandeliers.

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He Had Been Full Of The Idea So Long, Dreamed It Right Through To The End, Waited With His Teeth Set, So To Speak, At An Inconceivable Pitch Of Intensity. Now, In The Reaction, He Was Running Down Like An Overwound Clock.

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You're A Rotten Driver,' I Protested. 'either You Ought To Be More Careful Or You Oughtn't To Drive At All.' 'i Am Careful.' 'no, You're Not.' 'well, Other People Are,' She Said Lightly. 'what's That Got To Do With It?' 'they'll Keep Out Of My Way,' She Insisted. 'it Takes Two To Make An Accident.' 'suppose You Met Somebody Just As Careless As Yourself.' 'i Hope I Never Will,' She Answered. 'i Hate Careless People. That's Why I Like You.' Her Grey, Sun-strained Eyes Stared Straight Ahead, But She Had Deliberately Shifted Our Relations, And For A Moment I Thought I Loved Her.

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Every Author Ought To Write Every Book As If He Were Going To Be Beheaded The Day He Finished It.

She Felt A Little Betrayed And Sad, But Presently A Moving Object Came Into Sight. It Was A Huge Horse-chestnut Tree In Full Bloom Bound For The Champs Elysees, Strapped Now Into A Long Truck And Simply Shaking With Laughter - Like A Lovely Person In An Undignified Position Yet Confident None The Less Of Being Lovely. Looking At It With Fascination, Rosemary Identified Herself With It, And Laughed Cheerfully With It, And Everything All At Once Seemed Gorgeous.

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So We Beat On, Boats Against The Current, Borne Back Ceaselessly Into The Past.

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He Felt Married To Her, That Was All.

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The Early Twenties When We Drank Wood Alcohol And Every Day In Every Way Grew Better And Better, And There Was A First Abortive Shortening Of The Skirts, And Girls All Looked Alike In Sweater Dresses, And People You Didn't Want To Know Said "yes, We Have No Bananas," And It Seemed Only A Question Of A Few Years Before The Older People Would Step Aside And Let The World Be Run By Those Who Saw Things As They Were--and It All Seems Rosy And Romantic To Us Who Were Young Then, Because We Will Never Feel Quite So Intensely About Our Surroundings Any More.

I Was A Little Shocked At The Elaborateness Of The Lie.

I Know Myself," He Cried, "but That Is All-

Look At That,' She Whispered, And Then After A Moment: 'i'd Like To Just Get One Of Those Pink Clouds And Put You In It And Push You Around.

His Hand Took Hold Of Hers, And As She Said Something Low In His Ear He Turned Toward Her With A Rush Of Emotion. I Think That Voice Held Him Most, With Its Fluctuating, Feverish Warmth, Because It Couldn’t Be Over-dreamed —that Voice Was A Deathless Song.

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But I Suppose You Must Touch Life In Order To Spring From It.

Well, You Never Knew Exactly How Much Space You Occupied In People's Lives. Yet From This Fog His Affection Emerged--the Best Contacts Are When One Knows The Obstacles And Still Wants To Preserve A Relation.

If He Had To Bring All The Bitterness And Hatred Of The World Into His Heart, He Was Not Going To Be In Love With Her Again.

Her Fine High Forehead Sloped Gently Up To Where Her Hair, Bordering It Like An Armorial Shield, Burst Into Lovelocks And Waves And Curlicues Of Ash Blonde And Gold. Her Eyes Were Bright, Big, Clear, Wet And Shining, The Colour Of Her Cheeks Was Real, Breaking Close To The Surface From The Strong Young Pump Of Her Heart. Her Body Hovered Delicately On The Last Edge Of Childhood -- She Was Almost Eighteen, Nearly Complete, But The Dew Was Still On Her.

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God Knows What You've Been Doing, Everything You've Been Doing. You May Fool Me, But You Can't Fool God!

Amory Thought How It Was Only The Past That Seemed Strange And Unbelievable.

I Fell In Love With Her Courage, Her Sincerity, And Her Flaming Self Respect. And It's These Things I'd Believe In, Even If The Whole World Indulged In Wild Suspicions That She Wasn't All She Should Be. I Love Her And It Is The Beginning Of Everything.

So There Was Not An "i" Anymore - Not A Basis On Which I Could Organize My Self-respect - Save My Limitless Capacity For Toil That It Seemed I Possessed No More.

But I Felt That Tom Would Drift On Forever Seeking, A Little Wistfully, For The Dramatic Turbulence Of Some Irrecoverable Football Game

The History Of My Life Is The History Of The Struggle Between An Overwhelming Urge To Write And A Combination Of Circumstances Bent On Keeping Me From It.

Overwhelming Urge

Then I Grew Up, And The Beauty Of Succulent Illusions Fell Away From Me.

When I'm With You, I Don't Breathe Quite Right.

To Write It, It Took Three Months; To Conceive It Three Minutes; To Collect The Data In It All My Life.

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Beautiful Things Grow To A Certain Height And Then They Fail And Fade Off, Breathing Out Memories As They Decay.

Once I Thought That Lake Forest Was The Most Glamorous Place In The World. Maybe It Was.

I Like People And I Like Them To Like Me, But I Wear My Heart Where God Put It, On The Inside.

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And I Like Large Parties. They’re So Intimate. At Small Parties There Isn’t Any Privacy.

Premature Success Gives One An Almost Mystical Conception Of Destiny As Opposed To Will Power-at Its Worst The Napoleonic Delusion.

No Amount Of Fire Or Freshness Can Challenge What A Man Will Store Up In His Ghostly Heart.

She Was A Dark, Unenduring Little Flower - Yet He Thought He Detected In Her Some Quality Of Spiritual Reticence, Of Strength Drawn From Her Passive Acceptance Of All Things. In This He Was Mistaken.

Beauty Is Only To Be Admired, Only To Be Loved - To Be Harvested Carefully And Then Flung At A Chosen Lover Like A Gift Of Roses. It Seems To Me, So Far As I Can Judge Clearly At All, That My Beauty Would Be Used Like That.

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All That Kept Her From Breaking Was That It Was Not An Image Of Strength That Was Leaving Her; She Would Be Just As Strong Without Him.

I Am Tired Of Knowing Nothing And Being Reminded Of It All The Time.

Knowing Nothing

Receding From Grief, It Seems Necessary To Retrace The Same Steps That Brought Us There.

I Wish I Could Write. I Get These Ideas But I Never Seem To Be Able To Put Them In Words.

Prose Talent Depends On Having Something To Say And An Interesting, Highly Developed Way Of Saying It.

Character Is Plot, Plot Is Character.

Draw Your Chair Up Close To The Edge Of The Precipice And I’ll Tell You A Story.

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Modern Life... Changes No Longer Century By Century, But Year By Year, Ten Times Faster Than It Ever Has Before-populations Doubling, Civilizations Unified More Closely With Other Civilizations, Economic Interdependence, Racial Questions, And-we're Dawdling Along. My Idea Is That We've Got To Go Very Much Faster.

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Angry, And Half In Love With Her, And Tremendously Sorry, I Turned Away.

Great Gatsby Love

Never Confuse Activity With Action.

It Was Testimony To The Romantic Speculation He Inspired That There Were Whispers About Him From Those Who Had Found Little That It Was Necessary To Whisper About In This World.

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She Wouldn't Let Go Of The Letter. She Took It Into The Tub With Her And Squeezed It Up In A Wet Ball, And Only Let Me Leave It In The Soap Dish When She Saw That It Was Coming To Pieces Like Snow.

He Knew That When He Kissed This Girl, And Forever Wed His Unutterable Visions To Her Perishable Breath, His Mind Would Never Romp Again Like The Mind Of God.

So We Drove On Toward Death Through The Cooling Twilight.

Great Gatsby Gatsby

He Snatched Out His Hand Desperately As If To Snatch Only A Wisp Of Air, To Save A Fragment Of The Spot That She Had Made Lovely For Him. But It Was All Going By Too Fast Now For His Burred Eyes And He Knew That He Had Lost That Part Of It, The Freshest And The Best, Forever.

Good Manners Are An Admission That Everybody Is So Tender That They Have To Be Handled With Gloves. Now, Human Respect—you Don't Call A Man A Coward Or A Liar Lightly, But If You Spend Your Life Sparing People's Feelings And Feeding Their Vanity, You Get So You Can't Distinguish What Should Be Respected In Them.

Marriage Was Created Not To Be A Background But To Need One. Mine Is Going To Be Outstanding. It Can't, Shan't Be The Setting - It's Going To Be The Performance, The Lively, Lovely, Glamorous Performance, And The World Shall Be The Scenery.

They Seemed Nearer, Not Only Mentally, But Physically When They Read ... Their Chance Was To Make Everything Fine And Finished And Rich And Imaginative; They Must Bend Tiny Golden Tentacles From His Imagination To Hers, That Would Take The Place Of The Great, Deep Love That Was Never So Near, Yet Never So Much Of A Dream.

Let Me Tell You About The Very Rich. They Are Different From You And Me. They Possess And Enjoy Early, And It Does Something To Them, Makes Them Soft Where We Are Hard, And Cynical Where We Are Trustful, In A Way That, Unless You Were Born Rich, It Is Very Difficult To Understand. They Think, Deep In Their Hearts, That They Are Better Than We Are Because We Had To Discover The Compensations And Refuges Of Life For Ourselves. Even When They Enter Deep Into Our World Or Sink Below Us, They Still Think That They Are Better Than We Are. They Are Different.

I Must Hold In Balance The Sense Of The Futility Of Effort And The Sense Of The Necessity To Struggle; The Conviction Of The Inevitability Of Failure And Still The Determination To 'succeed'-and, More Than These, The Contradiction Between The Dead Hand Of The Past And The High Intentions Of The Future. If I Could Do This Through The Common Ills-domestic, Professional And Personal-then The Ego Would Continue As An Arrow Shot From Nothingness To Nothingness With Such Force That Only Gravity Would Bring It To Earth At Last.

It Makes Me Sad Because I've Never Seen Such--such Beautiful Shirts Before.

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He Had Possessed The Arrogance Of A Tall Member Of A Short Race, With No Obligation Save To Be Tall.

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.

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I've Given Parties That Have Made Indian Rajahs Green With Envy. I've Had Prima Donnas Break $10,000 Engagements To Come To My Smallest Dinners. When You Were Still Playing Button Back In Ohio, I Entertained On A Cruising Trip That Was So Much Fun That I Had To Sink My Yacht To Make My Guests Go Home.

And Yale Is November, Crisp And Energetic.

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Fairies: Nature's Attempt To Get Rid Of Soft Boys By Sterilizing Them.

For The Moment I Can Only Cry Out That I Have Lost My Splendid Mirage. Come Back, Come Back, O Glittering And White!

The Invitation To Miss Myra St. Claire's Bobbing Party Spent The Morning In His Coat Pocket, Where It Had An Intense Physical Affair With A Dusty Piece Of Peanut Brittle.

Every Act Of Life, From The Morning Toothbrush To The Friend At Dinner, Became An Effort. I Hated The Night When I Couldn't Sleep And I Hated The Day Because It Went Toward Night.

Nothing Any Good Isn't Hard.

And In The End, We Were All Just Humans...drunk On The Idea That Love, Only Love, Could Heal Our Brokenness.

It Was Only A Sunny Smile, And Little It Cost In The Giving, But Like Morning Light It Scattered The Night And Made The Day Worth Living.

I'm A Cynical Idealist.

Better Let It All Alone In The Depths Of Her Heart And The Depths Of The Sea.

There's No Substitute For Will. Sometimes You Have To Fake Will When You Don't Feel It At All.

I’m Not Sure What I’ll Do, But— Well, I Want To Go Places And See People. I Want My Mind To Grow. I Want To Live Where Things Happen On A Big Scale.

So They Were Desperately In Love And Being Desperately In Love Involves A Desperate Existence.

There Has Never Been An American Tragedy. There Have Only Been Great Failures.

France Was A Land, England Was A People, But America, Having About It Still That Quality Of The Idea, Was Harder To Utter - It Was The Graves At Shiloh And The Tired, Drawn, Nervous Faces Of Its Great Men, And The Country Boys Dying In The Argonne For A Phrase That Was Empty Before Their Bodies Withered. It Was A Willingness Of The Heart.

Well, I Can't Describe Her Exactly-except To Say That She Was Beautiful. She Was-tremendously Alive.

It's Just Because I Love The Past That I Want This House To Look Back On Its Glamourous Moment Of Youth And Beauty, And I Want Its Stairs To Creak As If To The Footsteps Of Women With Hoop Skirts And Men In Boots And Spurs. But They've Made It Into A Blondined, Rouged-up Old Woman Of Sixty.

Travel, Which Had Once Charmed Him, Seemed, At Length, Unendurable, A Business Of Color Without Substance, A Phantom Chase After His Own Dream's Shadow.

How Different It All Was From What You'd Planned.

He Could Transform The Barest Incident Into A Thing Of Curve And Contour.

I Want To Know You Moved And Breathed In The Same World With Me.

There's So Much Spring In The Air- There's So Much Lazy Sweetness In Your Heart.

Beauty And Love Pass, I Know... Oh, There's Sadness, Too. I Suppose All Great Happiness Is A Little Sad. Beauty Means The Scent Of Roses And Then The Death Of Roses-

Beauty And Love

A New Generation Dedicated More Than The Last To The Fear Of Poverty And The Worship Of Success; Grown Up To Find All Gods Dead, All Wars Fought, All Faiths In Man Shaken...

There Are Only The Pursued, The Pursuing, The Busy And The Tired.

Great Gatsby American Dream

What Was It Up There In The Song That Seemed To Be Calling Her Back Inside? What Would Happen Now In The Dim, Incalculable Hours?

The Extraordinary Thing Is Not That People In A Lifetime Turn Out Worse Or Better Than We Had Prophesied; Particularly In America That Is To Be Expected. The Extraordinary Thing Is How People Keep Their Levels, Fulfill Their Promises, Seem Actually Buoyed Up By An Inevitable Destiny.

It Is Youth’s Felicity As Well As Its Insufficiency That It Can Never Live In The Present, But Must Always Be Measuring Up The Day Against Its Own Radiantly Imagined Future

Live In The Present

No One Person In The World Is Necessary To You Or To Me.

Courage To Me Means Ploughing Through That Dull Gray Mist That Comes Down On Life-not Only Overriding People And Circumstances But Overriding The Bleakness Of Living. A Sort Of Insistence On The Value Of Life And The Worth Of Transient Things...my Courage Is Faith-faith In The Eternal Resilience Of Me-that Joy'll Come Back, And Hope And Spontaneity. And I Feel That Till It Does, I've Got To Keep My Lips Shut And My Chin High, And My Eyes Wide

When I See A Beautiful Shell Like That I Can't Help Feeling A Regret About What's Inside It.

Find The Key Emotion; This May Be All You Need Know To Find Your Short Story.

This Unlikely Story Begins On A Sea That Was A Blue Dream, As Colorful As Blue-silk Stockings, And Beneath A Sky As Blue As The Irises Of Children's Eyes.

I May Turn Out An Intellectual, But I'll Never Write Anything But Mediocre Poetry.

She Was Beautiful, But Not Like Those Girls In The Magazines. She Was Beautiful, For The Way She Thought. She Was Beautiful, For The Sparkle In Her Eyes When She Talked About Something She Loved. She Was Beautiful, For Her Ability To Make Other People Smile, Even If She Was Sad. No, She Wasn't Beautiful For Something As Temporary As Her Looks. She Was Beautiful, Deep Down To Her Soul. She Is Beautiful.

I Am Still A Little Afraid Of Missing Something If I Forget That, As My Father Snobbishly Suggested, And I Snobbishly Repeat, A Sense Of The Fundamental Decencies Is Parcelled Out Unequally At Birth.

You See I Usually Find Myself Among Strangers Because I Drift Here And There Trying To Forget The Sad Things That Happened To Me.

They Were Stars On This Stage, Each Playing To An Audience Of Two.

She Was A Mischief, And That Was A Satisfaction; No Longer Was She A Huntress Of Corralled Game

Here's To Alcohol, The Rose Colored Glasses Of Life.

Mostly, We Authors Must Repeat Ourselves - That's The Truth. We Have Two Or Three Great And Moving Experiences In Our Lives - Experiences So Great And Moving That It Doesn't Seem At The Time Anyone Else Has Been So Caught Up And So Pounded And Dazzled And Astonished And Beaten And Broken And Rescued And Illuminated And Rewarded And Humbled In Just That Way Ever Before. Then We Learn Our Trade, Well Or Less Well, And We Tell Our Two Or Three Stories - Each Time In A New Disguise - Maybe Ten Times, Maybe A Hundred, As Long As People Will Listen.

I Might Have Enjoyed The Company Of A Woman Or Two... Or Three But That Had Never Stopped Me From Loving You.

I Was In Love With A Whirlwind, So When The Girl Threw Me Over, I Went Home And Finished My Novel.

New York Had All The Iridescence Of The Beginning Of The World. The Returning Troops Marched Up Fifth Avenue And Girls Were Instinctively Drawn East And North Toward Them - This Was The Greatest Nation And There Was Gala In The Air.

Ah," She Cried, "you Look So Cool." Their Eyes Met, And They Stared Together At Each Other, Alone In Space. With An Effort She Glanced Down At The Table. You Always Look So Cool," She Repeated. She Had Told Him That She Loved Him, And Tom Buchanan Saw.

Life Is Much More Successfully Looked At From A Single Window.

No One Should Live Beyond 30.

No Decent Career Was Ever Founded On A Public.

The Sign Of Intelligence Is The Ability To Carry Opposed Thoughts At The Same Time.

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