F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes about identity

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.

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 faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour.

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

I’m thirty. I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour.

They’ll keep out of my way. It takes two to make an accident.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

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

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.

You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess.

A sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

I’m p-paralysed with happiness.

Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.

Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!

So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.

I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it, although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun.

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.

Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall.

“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”

You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.

There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend—all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness.

Don’t worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest pose of all.