Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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F. Scott Fitzgerald

1896 – 1940 CE

Prototype of "Jazz Age" exuberance

One of the greatest American writers, prototype of "Jazz Age" exuberance, and symbol of the "Lost Generation"; Fitzgerald became popular and successful during his lifetime but not respected in the literary world until after his death. His passion for writing interfered with his college pursuits and he had to drop out of Princeton and join the army where he became a student of Dwight Eisenhower whom he passionately disliked. During this time he met his future wife, Zelda Sayre who was the daughter of a state Supreme Court justice but she wouldn't marry him until his first novel became famous and he finally had an income steady enough to support her opulent lifestyle. Her later mental illness, his alcoholism, health and financial problems plagued his later years and he died from a heat attack when only 44.

Eras

Sources

Great Gatsby

Unlisted Sources

Echoes of the Jazz Age

Letters

Noteooks​

Rich Boy (1925)

Tender is the Night (1934)

The Beautiful and Damned (1922):

The Crack-Up (1936)

The Jazz Age

The Offshore Pirate

This Side of Paradise (1920)

Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald (38 quotes)

“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.”

from Rich Boy (1925)

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“Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revelry 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; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. . . .”

from This Side of Paradise (1920)

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“No man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”

from This Side of Paradise (1920)

Themes: Fame

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“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 tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones.”

from This Side of Paradise (1920)

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“The more strong lights, the more spiritual scandal you can throw on the matter, the more money they pay you, the more the people buy the issue.”

from This Side of Paradise (1920)

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“However the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.”

from This Side of Paradise (1920)

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“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.”

from This Side of Paradise (1920)

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“The victor belongs to the spoils.”

from The Beautiful and Damned (1922):

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“Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief—that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended”

from The Beautiful and Damned (1922):

Themes: Belief

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“Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshiped by mankind... They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible.”

from The Beautiful and Damned (1922):

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“Let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.”

from The Jazz Age

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“It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together.”

from The Jazz Age

Themes: Marriage

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“The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round... For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less... as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.”

from The Jazz Age

Themes: Old Age Longevity

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“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They are not like aches or wounds; they are more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there is not enough material.”

from The Jazz Age

Themes: Family

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“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”

from Great Gatsby

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“Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”

from Tender is the Night (1934)

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“the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

from The Crack-Up (1936)

Themes: Paradox

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“All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase— 'I love you.'”

from The Offshore Pirate

Themes: Love

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“Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”

from Noteooks​

Themes: Warriors

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“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”

from Letters

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“My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.”

from Letters

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“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.”

from Letters

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“You can take your choice between God and Sex. If you choose both, you're a hypocrite; if neither, you get nothing.”

from The Crack-Up (1936)

Themes: God Sex

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“I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: 'I've found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.'”

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“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life... It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

from Great Gatsby

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“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

from Great Gatsby

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“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning—”

from Great Gatsby

Themes: Shambhala

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“as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island—a fresh green breast of the new world... vanished trees [that] had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams... for a transitory enchanted moment many must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor denied”

from Great Gatsby

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“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

from Great Gatsby

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“his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.. For awhile these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.”

from Great Gatsby

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“Daisy began to sing... bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again.”

from Great Gatsby

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“appalled by the raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms, and by the too obtrusive fate that heeded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing, she saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.”

from Great Gatsby

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“Her voice was full of money... that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it... the king's daughter, the golden girl”

from Great Gatsby

Themes: Money

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“It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire... the most expensive orgy in history”

from Echoes of the Jazz Age

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“I am slow thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires... Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine”

from Great Gatsby

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“One thing's sure and nothing's surer
The rich get richer and the poor get—children”

from Great Gatsby

Themes: Family

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“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.”

from Great Gatsby

Themes: Sex

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“There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…”

Themes: Confusion

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Quotes about F. Scott Fitzgerald (3 quotes)

“[The Great Gatsby] seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James”

T. S. Eliot 1888 – 1965 CE

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“[Fitzgerald] was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a generation ... He might have interpreted them and even guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction.”

Anonymous 1
Freedom from the narrow boxes defined by personal history
from New York Times​ article

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“I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: 'I've found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.'”

F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896 – 1940 CE
Prototype of "Jazz Age" exuberance

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