Following Fitzgerald: Sheilah Graham on her first dance with Fitzgerald

Sheilah Graham on her first dance with Fitzgerald

“Now, finally, I danced with Scott, and as we danced, the room and everyone in it faded away. It is hard to put into words how Scott Fitzgerald worked this magic, but he made me feel that to dance with me was the most extraordinary privilege for him. He did it by his words, which seemed directed to me alone; he did it by the way he tilted his head back, a little to one side, as though he were mentally measuring, and then took complete possession of my eyes, my hair, my lips, all with a kind of delighted amazement at his good fortune to be dancing with me.” Sheilah Graham on her first dance with Fitzgerald

“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…”

“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.”

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

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

“Writers aren't exactly people...they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.”

“The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”

“An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.”

“Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”

“...he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”

"Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss anyone; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide somewhere safe out of sight, up in the corner of his mind."

LLR Books

Sheilah Graham on her first dance with Fitzgerald