Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; gro…
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This Side Of Paradise
This Side of Paradise is the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920, and taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine,
Characters
He stretched his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. "I know myself," he cried, "but that is all — "
And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he has passed....
He doesn't believe that public swimming-pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the world; moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it.
Look at you; you're on The New Democracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the country, read by the men who do things and all that. What's your business? Why, to be as clever, as interesting, and as brilliantly cynical as possible about every man, doctrine, book, or policy that is assigned yo…
There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth — yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams.
People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher — a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence thes…
I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation — with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against traditi…
“The truth is that the public has done one of those startling and amazing things that they do about once in a hundred years. They’ve seized an idea.” “What is it?” “That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.”
The shadow of a dove Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings; And down the valley through the crying trees The body of the darker storm flies; brings With its new air the breath of sunken seas And slender tenuous thunder . . . But I wait . . . Wait for the mists and for the blacker rain —…
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
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.'
I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.
Yes, I was perhaps an egotist in youth, but I soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself.
Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.
Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.
I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.