Lily Allbury > Lily's Quotes

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
― Fitzgerald F. Scott, The Great Gatsby

“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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won't.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“You'll find another.'
God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside. ”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby