Fitzgerald - Blog Posts

dijwefhnerifjfnfrufhuwidjweif omg omg omggggg- I think bsd brainrot hit me hard bc i freaked out and got super excited when my english teacher randomly brought up Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby 😭 literally the only thing way going in my mind was his twink version holy shit

And that taught me you can’t have anything, you can’t have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

F Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned

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

Fitzgerald and Class

I talked to a friend of mine about Hamlet yesterday. He hasn’t read it (not a literary man), so he asked me about its merits. I told him a little bit about this, a little bit about that and then I mentioned how the protagonist is considered to be the first modern man. I said this is probably one of the drama’s heaviest assets, as it’s remained relevant for centuries, to which my friend replied, “Yeah, classics sorta tend to stand the test of time. Suppose that’s why they’re, you know, classics.”

Coming from an art-novice it has the potential of being no more than a piece of conventional wisdom. Perhaps it really isn’t more than a common place but it made me wonder. I’ve had this thought for quite a while now that Fitzgerald was ahead of his time a great deal.

In his works This Side of Paradise and Beautiful and the Damned he wrote quite a few dialogues, where intellectual, authoritative characters contemplate thinking methods and philosophies but they all transcended the early twentieth century, as they almost always reached their climaxes in settling with critical theories.

Oh and he did it with such ease and elegance. Fitzgerald embodied what contemporary thinkers and artists want to become and he did it without ever coming off as artificial or fake. Fitzgerald’s works are classics because in them there are ideas, which were not borne by the time or the general opinion but of an unparalleled artistic mind.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain

F. Scott Fitzgerald (via hippyness)

Well, let it pass; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Sensible Thing”  (via wordsnquotes)

inspiring, although I’d argue with Wilde because immoral books don’t always show the world its flaws but sometimes encourage and multiply them (this was a tough lesson for me as an aspiring writer)

“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

“I should like to make life beautiful–I mean everybody’s life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it.“  ~ George Eliot

“Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”  ~ Ernest Hemingway

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” ~ Oscar Wilde  

“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.” ~ James Joyce

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” ~ Franz Kafka

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe

...you say that it’s a confession of weakness for a scientist not to write.

Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night

We all must try to be good.

Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

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, The Great Gatsby  (via sunst0ne)

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night  (via wordsnquotes)

In any case you mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (via honeyforthehomeless)

10 THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Brilliant, interesting and heartbrakingly familiar...

He stretched his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. “I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all — “

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Side of Paradise (via introspectivepoet)

When I was sixteen I read The Great Gatsby, and oh - Oh! I said, how it flows, how does this gorgeous iambic pentameter work its way through the valves of my arteries? ‘Within and without’ runs in my blood. Everything sounds like money to me. I wandered lonely as a cloud, only, no, old sport, I don’t wander, I plan. I lift weights like Benjamin Franklin. I gaze out, out, out, I am the poet. I am the huntsman. I lie in wait. I have for years. Sometimes I forget about The Bell Jar, but I remember The Iron Giant. Let me tell you, I’ve watched that movie every year of my life since I was seven years old, and I fell in love with the robot from a children’s story book to the big screen. I have since studied Metamorphoses and watched the hawk fly through the rain, but choking to death on my own breath? A touchy subject. What does F. Scott Fitzgerald have to say for himself when his wife’s journals lay strewn across his back catalogue? Where was Ted Hughes when Sylvia Plath collapsed in the kitchen? Boasting about his own work, or belittling hers? In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on their list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’. Where is Sylvia Plath? Where is Zelda Fitzgerald? Where are the women? Where are the gentle hands, the voices that clink like coins, where are the dangerous curves, where is the soaring fire of our generation? Show me your nails, filed to claws. Give me your ragged hearts, give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, give me your words. I want to hear your voices, louder and more insistent than ever before. I want The Times to write a new list. I need to hear the murmurs of agreement of every lecturer in the Arts and Humanities department of each university as they turn it over in their hands. To see a split between every gender so even that no one remembers where the line is, where the line ever was. This wave’s classic writers are gone, so bare your teeth and show me your fighting stance.

we are still behind the yellow wallpaper | ishani jasmin (via ishanijasmin)

So beautiful, so complicated, so problematic...

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Scott F. Fitzgerald

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (via abdullah-ryf)

more at @search-parties​ ✨

The closing lines of The Great Gatsby, perhaps the most enigmatic in American literature, handwritten by F. Scott Fitzgerald himself.