F. Scott Fitzgerald

“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.”

“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 big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.”

“He doesn't believe that public swimming”

“I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation”

“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”

“Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter... And the rain and over the fields a voice calling...”

“There are no second acts in American lives. The Last Tycoon , "Hollywood, ETC.," ed. Edmund Wilson”

“The rich are different.”

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. "The Rich Boy" (1926), paragraph 3.”

“The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we've forgotten there’s any other way. "Amory Blaine" in This Side of Paradise (1920) Bk. 2, Ch. 5”