F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes about mortality

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

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

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

The poor son-of-a-bitch.

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses—