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17 Quotes From Fitzgerald’s Darkest Book “The Beautiful & The Damned”

Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything.
Mélanie Berliet
August 25, 2016
“Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know— because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly. And when I got it it turned to dust in my hands.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Desire
“She was dazzling. It was agony to comprehend her beauty.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Beauty Is Terror, Agony of Beauty, Your Beauty Hurts
“I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Life, Nihilism
“It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Dreams
“Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Life, Pain of Living
“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Life, Pain of Living
“We all have souls of different ages.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Life, Pain of Living
“I don't care about truth. I want some happiness.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Life, Pain of Living
“She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Soul
“All I think of ever is that I love you.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Soul
“And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Lessons
“A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Lessons
“Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Lessons
“It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ—and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Twenties, 20-Somethings
“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Words Are Not Enough, Show Me Don't Tell Me You Love Me
“Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Drinking, Booz, Drunk!
“Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned [Annotated]
Tagged: Time, Never Again