LLR Books

Fitzgerald's writings

 “Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid.”  This Side of Paradise

“So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuningfork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”  The Great Gatsby

“Love went on around him  reproachless love and illicit love alike.” Love in the Night

 “I’d love to be in love.” Rags Martin Jones and the Prince of Wales

 “To be of great wit and conversational powers, and simultaneously strong and serious and silent. To be generous and open and selfsacrificing, yet to be somewhat mysterious and sensitive and even a little bitter with melancholy. To be both light and dark. To harmonize this, to melt all this down into a single man  ah, there was something to be done.” The Perfect Life

 “The fire blazing in her dark and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame.”
 The Beautiful and Damned

 “She looks at him once more, with infinite longing, infinite sadness.”
This Side of Paradise

 “She felt a sudden lump in her throat and she wanted to say something that would tell him how much it had meant to her, too. But she found no words.” Benediction

 “He saw she was lying, but it was a brave lie. They talked from their hearts — with the half truths and evasions peculiar to that organ, which has never been famed as an instrument of precision.” Forging Ahead

 “Then she kissed him until the sky seemed to fade out and all her smiles and tears to vanish in an ecstasy of eternal seconds.” The Ice Palace

 “Momentarily he had forgotten her too — almost in the second of his flesh breaking from hers she had a foretaste that things were going to be different than she had expected. She felt the nameless fear which precedes all emotions, joyous or sorrowful, inevitable as a hum of thunder precedes a storm.”  Tender is the Night

“Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.” —       , A Nice Quiet Place

 “When the scarlet corners of her lips curved down, it was less a smile than an invitation to a kiss.” Winter Dreams

 “She had never felt so sorry for him; she had never loved him so much.”  The CutGlass Bowl

 “She could feel him slipping out of her heart, feel the space he left, and all at once he was gone.” Two Wrongs

 “And deep under the aching sadness that will pass in time, she feels that she has lost something, she knows not what, she knows not why.”   This Side of Paradise

 “I’m yours  you know it.”   This Side of Paradise

 “I used to dream about our home, our children, about holding you in my arms and touching your face and hands and hair that used to belong to me, and now I just can’t wake up.”  The Bridal Party

 “She saw through to his profound woundedness, and something quivered inside her, died out along the curve of her mouth and in her eyes. He had moved her. All the unforgettable impulses of first love had surged up once more.”   The Bridal Party

"Her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.” (from the short story A New Leaf)

“He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.”   Tender is the Night

 “She told him in a dozen ways, of which the best was without words, how she had missed him. Her emotion reassured him, promised his anxious heart that everything would be all right.”   The Sensible Thing

 “I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.”  Head and Shoulders

 “She seemed beautiful to him then; that vague unexciting quality about her was more than compensated for by her exquisite delicacy, the fine luxury of her life.”   A Night at the Fair

“She knew what he wanted, and gave it to him; not words, but a smile of warmth and delight — a smile that said, “I’m yours for the asking; I’m won.” It was not a smile that undervalued herself, because through its beauty it spoke for both of them, expressed all the potential joy that existed between them.”  Emotional Bankruptcy

 “You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.”  Love in the Night

“She clung nearer desperately and once more he kissed her and was chilled by the innocence of her kiss, by the glance that at the moment of contact looked beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world. She did not know yet that splendor is something in the heart; at the moment when she realized that and melted into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret.”
 Tender is the Night


 “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 overdreamed — that voice was a deathless song.”
 The Great Gatsby

 “Their cool cheeks and warm lips met in the crisp darkness, and, watching the icy moon over his shoulder, Annie knew that she was his surely and, pulling his face down, kissed him again, trembling with emotion.”  At Your Age

 “They were young and gravely passionate; they demanded everything and then yielded everything again in ecstasies of unselfishness and pride. She loved the swift tones of his voice and his frantic, if unfounded jealousy. He loved her dark radiance, the white irises of her eyes, the warm, lustrous enthusiasm of her smile.”  The Lees of Happiness

“Love is fragile she was thinking but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love words, the tendernesses learned, are treasured up for the next lover.”  May Day

“The things that’ll make you fail I’ll love always— the living in the past, the lazy days and nights you have, and all your carelessness and generosity.”  The Ice Palace

 “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”  The Great Gatsby

“The sudden dawns we laughed to greet,
That all could see, that none could share,
Will be but dawns,and if we meet
We shall not care.”
This Side of Paradise

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”
The CrackUp

“I don’t think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something.”
The Rich Boy

“His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.”
The Diamond As Big As The Ritz

“As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.”  Tender is the Night

 “They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”  This Side of Paradise

 “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.” This Side of Paradise

“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, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”  The Beautiful and Damned

“It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible.” The Lees of Happiness

 “For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.” The Great Gatsby

“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 flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.”  The Diamond As Big As The Ritz

 “So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuningfork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” The Great Gatsby

“Time was the end of riddles, We were the end of time.”, The Side of Paradise