What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must...

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

They always believe that ‘things are in a bad way now,’ but they ‘haven’t any faith in these idealists.’ One minute they call Wilson ‘just a dreamer, not practical’- a year later they rail at...

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,...

Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun...

Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?” –

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things...

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been...

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-

I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That’s what’s called ingenuousness.

Rather nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.

One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil

Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.

I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

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.

a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely—taking almost a delight in the thrust. Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent...

My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis– a moulding of the confusion of life into form.

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.

Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter…Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.Walking alone…was it splendor, or...

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.

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...

Her insan kendinde en az bir büyük erdem olduğuna inanır. Benimki, tanıdıklarım arasında en dürüst kişi olmamdır.

A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

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,...

Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality – he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an...

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.

Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?

My hair– bob it!

She walked rather quickly; she liked to be active, though at times she gave an impression of repose that was at once static and evocative. This was because she knew few words and believed in...

Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.

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.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied...

Amory: I love you.Rosalind: I love you- now.

because they always needed lawyers after a revolution to straighten out all the legal side.

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....

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

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...

Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.

Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you–it’s a wall that an active you runs up against.

Never miss a party…good for the nerves–like celery.

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.