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81 " The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
82 " Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , This Side of Paradise
83 " Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Beautiful and Damned
84 " Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person. "
85 " Courage is a sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things. "
86 " My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness. "
87 " I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Great Gatsby
88 " I want excitement; and I don’t care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat. "
89 " I am glad you are happy--but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life. "
90 " I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , Gatsby Girls
91 " I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life. "
92 " That we shall use every discovery of science in the preservation of our children's health goes without saying; but we shall do more than this - we shall give them a free start, not loading them up with our own ideas and experiences, nor advising them to live according to our lights. We were burned in the fire here and there, but - who knows? - fire may not burn our children, and if we warn them away from it they may end by never growing warm. We will not even inflict our cynicism on them as the sentimentality of our fathers was inflicted on us. The most we will do is urge a little doubt, asking that the doubt be exercised on our ideas as well as on all the mortal things in this world. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , A Short Autobiography
93 " I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's unwanted children. What a fate - to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers. ...Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings. "
94 " No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. "
95 " Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world--they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , Tender Is the Night
96 " I mean the women who, without any of the prerogatives of youth and beauty, demand continual slavery from their men....They sit back complacently and watch their husbands slave for them; and, without furnishing any of the pleasantries of life for their husbands, they demand the sort of continual attention that a charming fiancée might get....They are harridans and shrews who continually nag and scold until the men are driven idiotic. "
97 " That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong. "
98 " There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. "
99 " I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds....it is an absolute fact---so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life. "
100 " I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go "