Quote

When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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F. Scott Fitzgerald
Age: 43 †
Born: 1897
Born: September 24
Died: 1940
Died: December 21
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
St Paul
Minnesota
Francis Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
Ordinary
Worn
Must
Wants
Plain
Shoddy
Work
Morning
Author
Superlatives
Something
Finds
Heroine
Start
Lovely
Mornings
Able
Rate
Heroines
Better
Rule
Inferiors
Firsts
Writers
Exquisite
First

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I was too absorbed to be responsive
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I am a woman and my business is to hold things together. My business is to tear them apart.
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It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before.
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Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.
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Girls like you are responsible for all the tiresome colorless marriages all those ghastly inefficiencies that pass as feminine qualities. What a blow it must be when a man with imagination marries the beautiful bundle of clothes that he's been building ideals around, and finds that she's just a weak, whining, cowardly mass of affectations!
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.
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Of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one. . . . Vitality never takes. You have it or you haven't it, like health or brown eyes or a baritone voice.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
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Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.
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America is a willingness of the heart.
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we both fitted. If our corners were not rubbed off they were at least pulled in. But deep in us both was something that made us require more for happiness. I didn't know what I wanted
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Intelligence is measured by a person's ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.
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A new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
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He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall.
F. Scott Fitzgerald