Quotes

What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon . . . and the day after that, and the next thirty years?

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

Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable vision to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.

His imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby . . . sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.

I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened , the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

It is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

Now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

A sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

This is to tell you about a young man named Ernest Hemingway, who lives in Paris (an American), writes for the Transatlantic Review and has a brilliant future. . . . I’d look him up right away. He’s the real thing.

Tales of the Jazz Age.

“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”

The victor belongs to the spoils.

I like to keep a bottle of stimulant handy in case

I’ve been drunk only once in my life. But that lasted for twenty-three years.

[ Of Charlie Chaplin :] The son of a bitch is a ballet dancer. . . . He’s the best ballet dancer that ever lived . . . and if I get a good chance I’ll kill him with my bare hands.

[ Deathbed remark while reading the Bible :] I’m looking for loopholes.

[ Cuthbert J. Twillie, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] A thing worth having is worth cheating for.

[ The Great Man, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] I was in love with a beautiful blonde once. She drove me to drink. ’Tis the one thing I’m indebted to her for.

[ Cuthbert J. Twillie, played by W. C. Fields, responding to the question, “Is this a game of chance?” :] Not the way I play it.

[ When asked whether he liked children :] I do if they’re properly cooked!

I’d rather have two girls at 21 each, than one girl at 42.

[ Larsen E. Whipsnade, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] You kids are disgusting, skulking around here all day, reeking of popcorn and lollipops.

Now don’t say you can’t swear off drinking; it’s easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.

You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man.

[ Sam Bisbee, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] It’s a funny old world—a man’s lucky if he gets out of it alive.

[ Harold Bissonette, played by W. C. Fields, replying to a real estate agent who said “You’re drunk” :] Yeah, and you’re crazy. I’ll be sober tomorrow, but you’ll be crazy the rest of your life.

[ Mr. Snavely, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] It ain’t a fit night out for man or beast.

[ Professor Quail, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] Now that I’m here, I shall dally in the valley—and believe me, I can dally.

[ J. Effingham Bellweather, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :] Godfrey Daniel!

[ Rollo La Rue, played by W. C. Fields, speaking :]

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been made: that’s what God heard before creating the world, when there was nothing yet. I have also heard that one, he may have answered from the old, split Nothingness. And then he began.

La Dolce Vita .

The ideal woman which is in every man’s mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what’s beautiful, and it’s best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board. . . . If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Really the writer doesn’t want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall—Kilroy was here—that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

The Long Hot Summer.

Oh yes, he will survive it because he has that in him which will endure even beyond the ultimate worthless tideless rock freezing slowly in the last red and heatless sunset, because already the next star in the blue immensity of space will be already clamorous with the uproar of his debarkation, his puny and inexhaustible voice still talking, still planning.