F. Scott Fitzgerald

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.

Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It__ a sad season of life without growth_It has no day.

I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn__ want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.

There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

There__ a loneliness that only exists in one__ mind. The loneliest moment in someone__ life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.

The loneliest moment in someone__ life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

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

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.

I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - people didn't get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.

We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.

They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain...

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

...he told me all the things he liked to THINK he thought in the misty past.

I lived here once," the author said after a moment."Here? For a long time?""No. For just a little while when I was young.""It must have been rather cramped.""I didn't notice.""Would you like to try it again?""No. And I couldn't if I wanted to."He shivered slightly and closed the windows. As they went downstairs, the visitor said, half apologetically: "It's really just like all houses, isn't it?"The author nodded."I didn't think it was when I built it, but in the end I suppose it's just like other houses after all.