Home > Work > Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

Babylon Revisited and Other Stories QUOTES

Babylon Revisited and Other Stories QUOTES

1 " It isn't given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords. "

― F. Scott Fitzgerald , Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

2 " Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the supposition of a previous perfect faith. Does that fix it? "

― F. Scott Fitzgerald , Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

3 " I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone. "

― F. Scott Fitzgerald , Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

4 " He did not understand all he had heard, but from his clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad. "

― F. Scott Fitzgerald , Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

5 " Don’t ever phone if you can possibly come yourself. Don’t ever leave if you can stay. "

― F. Scott Fitzgerald , Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

6 " and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word 'dissipate' -- to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion. "

― F. Scott Fitzgerald , Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

7 " We'll all be failures?"
"Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of - of ineffectual and sad, and - oh, how can I tell you? "

― F. Scott Fitzgerald , Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

8 " Basil flushed and made a poor pass. He had been called by a nickname. It was a poor makeshift, but it was something more than the stark bareness of his surname or a term of derision. Brick Wales went on playing, unconscious that he had done anything in particular or that he had contributed to the events by which another boy was saved from the army of the bitter, the selfish, the neurasthenic and the unhappy. It isn’t given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords. "

― F. Scott Fitzgerald , Babylon Revisited and Other Stories