Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

• After greeting Rosemary and her mother he waited for them to speak first, as if to allow them the reassurance of their own voices in new surroundings.
• I haven't seen a paper lately but I suppose there's a war--there always is.
• New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
• Things ought to belong to the people that like them.
• Until you're eighteen nothing matters. And afterward it's the same way.
• He kissed her without enjoying it. He knew that there was passion there, but there was no shadow of it in her eyes or on her mouth.
• So many people are going to love you and it might be nice to meet your first love all intact, emotionally too. That's an old-fashioned idea, isn't it?
• The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.
• I suppose I got bored; and then it was such a long way to go back in order to get anywhere.
• I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.
• When a child can disturb a middle-aged gent--things get difficult.
• Nicole was sure that the money she spent was hers--Rosemary still thought her money was miraculously lent to her and she must consequently be very careful of it.
• There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything.
• He was himself a digest of what was within the book, that he could brief it five years from now, if it deserved to be briefed.
• The price of his intactness was incompleteness.
• Introspection is not good for a highly nervous state.
• Sometimes she speaks of 'the past' as people speak who have been in prison. But you never know whether they refer to the crime or the imprisonment or the whole experience.
• Soon you will be writing little books called 'Deep Thoughts for the Layman,' so simplified that they are positively guaranteed not to cause thinking.
• But for a girl I think she ought to have lots of minor accomplishments and pass them on to her children.
• People living alone get used to loneliness.
• I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.
• Nicole knew about it but only darkly and tragically, hating him a little in an animal way, yet wanting to rub against his shoulder.
• "Wouldn't it be fun it--" it had been; and then, "Won't it be fun when--"
• When Dick could no longer play what he wanted to play on the piano, it was an indication that life was being refined down to a point.
• Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect--you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.
• If I knew what I had done to deserve this I could accept it with equanimity.
• You mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.
• It's always a delusion when I see what you don't want me to see.
• You can help yourself most.
• He thought about her with detachment, loving her for her best self.
• Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play."
• Being alone in body and spirit begets loneliness, and loneliness begets more loneliness.
• Her husband still shushed her when she grew violently naive.
• The best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.
• But some day I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.
• But you never know how you once felt. Do you?
• I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.
• No friendship worth the name was ever destroyed in an hour without some painful flesh being torn.
• So easy to be loved--so hard to love.
• We get a lot of understanding at the end of life.
• Dick wrote a little with no particular method; it was one of those parts of life that is an awaiting.
• Either one learns politeness at home or the world teaches it to you with a whip and you may get hurt in the process.
• Abe educated her, and now she's married to a Buddha. If Europe ever goes Bolshevik she'll turn up as the bride of Stalin.
• In the fine spring morning the inhibitions of the male world disappeared and she reasoned as gaily as a flower, while the wind blew her hair until her head moved with it.
• Yet it was a man's world she had overheard.
• It's hard to go on liking people who don't like you.
• She had played planet to Dick's sun.
• Either you think--or else other have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
• I'm just a whole lot of different simple people.
• She felt the nameless fear which precedes all emotions, joyous or sorrowful, inevitable as a hum of thunder precedes a storm.
• It is hard for those who have once been mentally afflicted to be sorry for those who are well.
• When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.
• If you don't like nice people, try the ones who aren't nice, and see how you like that! All people want is to have a good time and if you make them unhappy you cut yourself off from nourishment.

6/11/2003