F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes about memory & the past

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.

Oh, you want too much! I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past. I did love him once—but I loved you too.

He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before. She’ll see.

Your wife doesn’t love you. She’s never loved you. She loves me.

In any case, it was just personal.

I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.