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

The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?

A writer's temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair.

I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor

A man's social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

The hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta.

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

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

There's so much spring in the air- there's so much lazy sweetness in your heart.

She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

"I was counting the waves", replied Amory gravely, "I'm going in for statistics".

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

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

Someday I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.

The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want

She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.

The sign of intelligence is the ability to carry opposed thoughts at the same time.

Take off that darn fur coat!...Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth.

I can’t exactly describe how I feel but it’s not quite right. And it leaves me cold.

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby [is] my imaginary eldest brother.

In short, you have only your emotions to sell. This is the experience of all writers.

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.

So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing.

i'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires

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

I see you're looking at my cuff buttons." I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

But I always felt that I'd rather be provincial hot-tamale than soup without seasoning.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

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

Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.

The world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning.

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

Receding from grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.

the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.

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