F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”

"Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains..."

“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her, and it is the beginning of everything.”

"You never know what's coming for you."

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

"'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.'"

"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..."

"No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."

"The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky."

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

"Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

"The rich get richer and the poor get — children.”

“'They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.'”

“I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.”

"As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership."

“Her voice is full of money.”

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

"I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."

"In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars."

"Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope."

"...one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty−one that everything afterward savors of anti−climax."

"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."

"He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself."

"Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life."

"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."

"'Think how you love me,' she whispered.'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.'
'You'll always be like this to me.'
'Oh no; but promise me you'll remember.' Her tears were falling. 'I'll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight.'"

""Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.
"You always look so cool," she repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw."

"Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice, and I’ll tell you a story."

"It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being."

"I want leisure to read—an immense amount."

"I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me."

"All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase-- 'I love you.'"

"It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people."

"I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library."

"Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away."

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."

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

"Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry."

"All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.'"

"Then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses."

"They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered."

"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."

"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."

"You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming."

"And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life."

"With people like us our home is where we are not."

"So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight."

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Quotes - Betty Smith

"Mother, I am young. Mother, I am just eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard. What must I do, mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?"

"The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret."

I know that's what people say-- you'll get over it. I'd say it, too. But I know it's not true. Oh, you'll be happy again, never fear. But you won't forget. Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him.

The library was a little old shaby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.

Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.

Katie had a fierce desire for survival which made her a fighter. Johnny had a hankering after immortality which made him a useless dreamer. And that was the great difference between these two who loved each other so well.

"Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere-- be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost."

There is here, what is not in the old country. In spite of hard, unfamiliar things, there is here - hope. In the old country, a man can be no more than his father, providing he works hard. If his father was a carpenter, he may be a carpenter. He many not be a teacher or a priest. He may rise - but only to his father's state. In the old country, a man is given to the past. Here he belongs to the future. In this land, he may be what he will, if he has the good heart and the way of working honestly at the right things.

The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child's life.

For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But one day, she looked at a page and the word "mouse" had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word, and the picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw "horse," she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word "running" hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between the individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read!

No, Katie never fumbled. When she used her beautifully shaped but worn-looking hands, she used them with surety, whether it was to put a broken flower into a tumbler of water with one true gesture, or to wring out a scrub cloth with one decisive motion--the right hand turning in, and the left out, simultaneously. When she spoke, she spoke truly with the plain right words. And her thoughts walked in a clear uncompromising line.

I want to live for something. I don't want to live to get charity food to give me enough strength to go back to get more charity food.

People looking up at her--at her smooth pretty vivacious face--had no way of knowing about the painfully articulated resolves formulating in her mind.

Those were the Rommely women: Many, the mother, Evy, Sissy, and Katie, her daughters, and Francie, who would grow up to be a Rommely woman even though her name was Nolan. They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering eyes and soft fluttery voices...But they were made out of thin invisible steel.

The world was hers for the reading.

Yes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants. I'll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Saturday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a flower or some leaves or berries always in it and books . . . books . . . books.

She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father stumbling home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more...It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life - the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

Look at everthing as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.

"Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. I, myself, even in this day and at my age, have great need of recalling the miraculous lives of the Saints and the great miracles that have come to pass on earth. Only by having these things in my mind can I live beyond what I have to live for."

"Well," Francie decided, "I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life - and nothing else but."

Everyone said it was a pity that a slight pretty woman like Katie Nolan had to go out scrubbing floors. But what else could she do considering the husband she had, they said.

Francie knew that mama was a good woman. She knew. And papa said so. Then, why did she like her father better than her mother? Why did she? Papa was no good. He said so himself. But she liked papa better.

Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.

Maybe that decision was her great mistake. She should have waited until some man came along who felt that way about her. Then her children would not have gone hungry; she would not have had to scrub floors for their living and her memory of him would have remained a tender shining thing. But she wanted Johnny Nolan and no one else and she set out to get him.

And Francie, pausing in her sweeping to listen, tried to put everything together and tried to understand a world spinning in confusion. And it seemed to her that the whole world changed in between the time that Laurie was born and graduation day.

And he asked for her whole life as simply as he'd ask for a date. And she promised away her whole life as simply as she'd offer a hand in greeting or farewell.

Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you'd give your life to spare them.

So like papa...so like papa, she thought. But he had more strength in his face than papa had had.

A new tree had grown from the stump and its trunk had grown along the ground until it reached a place where there were no wash lines above it. Then it had started to grow towards the sky again. Annie, the fir tree, that the Nolans had cherished with waterings and manurings, had long since sickened and died. But this tree in the yard--this tree that men chopped down...this tree that they built a bonfire around, trying to burn up its stump--this tree had lived!

Dr. Zhivago Quotes

- Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak has become my favorite book. A rather long collection, these quotes moved me so deeply, I could not shorten them.

"Rome was a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a bargain basement on two floors, earth and heaven, a mass of filth convoluted in a triple not as in an intestinal obstruction. Dacians, Herulians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hyperboreans, heavy wheels without spokes, eyes sunk in fat, sodomy, double chins, illiterate emperors, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves. There were more people in the world than there have ever been since, all crammed into the passages of the Coliseum, and all wretched.

And then, into this tasteless heap of gold and marble, He came, light and clothed in an aura, emphatically human, deliberately provincial, Galilean, and at that moment gods and nations ceased to be and man came into being - man the carpenter, man the plowman, man the shepherd with his flock of sheep at sunset, man who does not sound in the least proud, man thankfully celebrated in all the cradle songs of mothers and in all the picture galleries the world over."

"The dog hated the girl, tore her stockings, growled at her, bared its teeth. It was jealous of her as if fearing that she would infect its master with something human."

"Yura devoured them with his eyes. Unseen in the half darkness, he kept staring into the circle of lamplight. The scene between the captive girl and her master was both ineffably mysterious and shamelessly frank. His heart was torn by contradictory feelings of a strength he had never experienced before.

Here was the very thing which he, Tonia, and Misha had endlessly discussed as 'vulgar,' the force which so frightened and attracted them and which they controlled so easily from a safe distance by words. And now, here it was, this force, in front of Yura's very eyes, utterly real, and yet troubled and haunting, pitilessly destructive, and complaining and calling for help - and what had become of their childish philosophy and what was Yura to do now?"

"Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for animal life.
But, all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and didn't notice it."

"Consciousness is a light directed outward, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don't stumble. It's like the headlights on a locomotive - turn them inward and you'd crash."

"And now listen carefully. You in others - this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life - your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you - the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it."

"The falling snow could be seen only beyond the far end of the roofs; seen so far away, it looked almost still, sinking to the ground as slowly as bread crumbs thrown to fishes sink through water."

"This was the moment of spring when the earth emerges from the snow looking much as when the snow trapped it six months earlier. The wood smelled of damp and was heaped with last years leaves like an unswept room where people have been tearing up letters, bills, and receipts for years."

"He longed to shout to him and to the people in the railway coach that salvation lay not in loyalty to forms but in throwing them off."

"At childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone. At this vital moment the man's part is as irrelevant as if he had never had anything to do with it, as though the whole thing had dropped from heaven. It is woman, by herself, who brings forth her progeny, and carries it off to some remote corner of existence, a quiet, safe place or a crib. Alone, in silence and humility, she feeds and rears the child…"

"It's only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life, everything gets mixed up. Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same things?"

"Larisa Feodorovna had realized how unhappy he felt and had no wish to upset him further by painful scenes. She tried to hear him out as calmly as she could. They were talking in one of the empty front rooms. Tears were running down her cheeks, but she was no more conscious of them than the stone statues on the house across the road were of the rain running down their faces. She kept saying softly, 'Do as you think best, don't worry about me. I'll get over it.' She was saying it sincerely, without any false magnanimity, and as she did not know she was crying she did not wipe away her tears.

At the thought that Lara might have misunderstood him, and that he had left her with a wrong impression and false hopes, he nearly turned and galloped straight back, to say what he had left unsaid and above all to take leave of her much more warmly, more tenderly, in a manner more suitable to a last farewell. Controlling himself with difficulty, he continued on his way."

"The wooden houses and pavements on the outskirts of the town…He is on his way to her. In a moment he will leave the wooden sidewalks and vacant lots for the paved streets. The small suburban houses flash by like the pages in a book, not as when you turn them over one by one with your forefinger but as when you hold your thumb on the edge of the book and let them all swish past at once. The speed is breathtaking. And over there is her house at the far end of the street, under the white gap in the rain clouds where the sky is clearing, towards the evening. How he loves the little houses in the street that lead to her! He could pick them up and kiss them. Those one-eyed attics with their roofs pulled down like caps. And the lamps and the icon lights reflected in the puddles and shining like berries. And her house under the white rift of the sky! There he will again receive the dazzling, God-made gift of beauty from the hands of its Creator. A dark muffled figure will open the door, and the promise of her nearness, unowned by anyone in the world and guarded and cold as a white northern night, will reach him like the first wave of the sea as you run down over the sandy beach in the dark."

"Speech is silver, silence is gold."

"I would say that man is made up of two parts, of God and work. Each succeeding stage in the development of the human spirit is marked by the achievement over many generations of an enormously slow and lengthy work. Such a work was Egypt. Greece was another. The theology of the Old Testament prophets was a third. The last in time, not yet superseded by anything else and still being accomplished by all who are inspired, is Christianity.

To show you the completely new thing it brought into the world in all its freshness - not as you know it and are used to it but more simply, more directly, I should like to go over a few extracts from the liturgy - only a very few, and abridged at that.

Most liturgical texts brings together the concepts of the Old Testament and the New Testament and put them side by side. For instance, the burning bush, the exodus from Egypt, the youths in the fiery furnace, Jonah and the whole are presented as parallels to the immaculate conception and resurrection of Christ.

Such comparisons bring out, very strikingly, I think, the way in which the Old Testament is old and the Gospel is new. In a number of texts, Mary's motherhood is compared to the crossing of the Red Sea by the Jews. For instance, there is once verse that begins: 'The Red Sea is the likeness of the virgin bride,' and goes on to say that 'as the sea was impenetrable after its crossing by the Israelites, the Immaculate One was incorrupt after the birth of Emmanuel.' That is to say, after the Jews crossed the Red Sea it became impassable, as before, and the Virgin after giving birth to our Lord was immaculate as before. A parallel is drawn between the two events. What kind of events are they? Both are supernatural, both are recognized as miracles. What then, was regarded as miraculous in each epoch - the ancient, primitive epoch and the later, post-Roman epoch which was far more advanced?

In the first miracle your have a popular leader, the patriarch Moses, dividing the waters by magic gestures, allowing a whole nation, countless numbers, hundreds of thousands of people, to go through, and when the last man is across the sea closes up again and submerges and drowns the pursuing Egyptians. The whole pictures in the spirit of antiquity - the elements obeying the magician, great jostling multitudes like Roman armies on the march, a people and a leader. Everything is visible, audible, overpowering.

In the second miracle you have a girl - an everyday figure who would have gone unnoticed in the ancient world - quietly, secretly bringing forth a child, bringing forth life, bringing forth the miracle of life, the 'universal life,' as He was afterwards called. The birth of her child is not only a violation of human laws as interpreted by the scribes, since it was out of wedlock; it also contradicts the laws of nature. She gives birth not by virtue of a natural process, but by a miracle, by an inspiration. And from now on, the basis of life is to be that inspiration which the Gospel strives to make the foundation of life, contrasting the commonplace with the unique, the weekday with the holiday, and repudiating all compulsion.

What an enormously significant change! How did it come about that an individual human event, insignificant by ancient standards, was regarded as equal in significance to the migrations of a whole people? Why should it have this value in the eyes of heaven? - For it is through the eyes of heaven that is must be judged, it is before the face of the heavens and in the sacred light of its own uniqueness that it all takes place….Individual human life became the life story of God, and its contents filled with the vast expanses of the universe."

"There is some doubt as to whether this does refer to the Magdalene or to one of the other Marys, but anyway, she begs our Lord:

'Unbind my debt as I unbind my hair.' It means, 'As I loosen my hair, do Thou release me from my guilt.' Could any expression of repentance, of the thirst to be forgiven, be more concrete, more tangible?

And later on in the liturgy for the same day there is another, more detailed passages, and this time it almost certainly refers to Mary Magdalene.

Again, she repents in a terribly tangible way over her past, saying that every night her flesh burns because of her old inveterate habits. 'For the night is to me the flaring up of lust, the dark, moonless zeal of sin.' She begs Christ to accept her tears of repentance and be moved by the sincerity of her sighs, so that she may dry his most pure feet with her hair - reminding Him that in the rushing waves of her hair Eve took refuge when she was overcome with fear and shame in paradise. 'Let me kiss Thy most pure feet and water them with my tears and dry them with the hair of my head, which covered Eve and sheltered her in its rushing waves when she was afraid in the cool of the day in paradise.' And immediately after all this about her hair, she exclaims: 'Who can fathom the multitude of my sins or the depths of Thy mercy?' What familiarity, what equality between God and life, God and the individual, God and a woman!"

"But about Varykino. Of course, to go to that wilderness in winter, without food, without strength or without hope - it's utter madness. But why not, my love? Let's be mad, if there is nothing except madness left to us."

"Our days really are numbered. So at least let us have the advantage of them in our own way. Let us use them up saying goodbye to life, being together for the last time before we are parted. We'll say goodbye to everything we hold dear, to the way we look at things, to the way we've dreamed of living and to what our conscience has taught us, and to our hopes and to each other. We'll speak to one another once again the secret words we speak at night, great and pacific like the name of the Asian ocean. It's not just for nothing that you stand at the end of my life, my hidden, forbidden angel, under the skies of war and turmoil, you who arose at its beginning under the peaceful skies of childhood."

"Often since then I have tried to define and give a name to the enchantment that you communicated to me that night, that faint glow, that distant echo, which later permeated my whole being and gave me a key to the understanding of everything in the world.

When you rose out of the darkness of that room, like a shadow in a school girl's dress, I, a boy who knew nothing about you, understood who you were, with all the tormenting intensity which responded in me: I realized that this scraggy thin little girl was charged, as with electricity, with all the femininity in the world. If I had touched you with so much as the tip of my finger, a spark would have lit up the room and either killed me on the spot or charged me for the whole of my life with magnetic waves of sorrow and longing. I was filled to the brim with tears, I cried and glowed inwardly. I was a mortally sorry for myself, a boy, and still more sorry for you, a girl. My whole being was astonished and asked: If it is so painful to love and to be charged with this electric current, how much more painful must it be to a woman and to be the current, and to inspire love."

"The vegetable kingdom can easily be thought of as the nearest neighbor of the kingdom of death. Perhaps the mysteries of evolution and the riddles of life that so puzzle us are contained in the green of the earth, among the trees and the flowers of graveyards. Mary Magdalene did not recognize Jesus risen from the grave, 'supposing him to be the gardener.'"

On the Road - Kerouac Quotes

"We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time."

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."

"Our battered suitcases were were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."

"We were all thinking we'd never see one another again, and we didn't care."

"I suddenly realized that all these women were spending months of loneliness and womanliness together, chatting about the madness of men."

"It was remarkable how Dean could go mad and then suddenly continue with his soul- which I think is wrapped up in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road- calmly and sanely as though nothing had happened."

"I didn't know who he was anymore, and he knew this, and sympathized, and pulled the blanket over my shoulders."