F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, came out in 1920.
The title comes from a section in Rupert Brooke’s poem Tiare Tahiti, which analyzes the lifestyles and morals of post-World War I young people.
The story revolves on Amory Blaine, who inherited every feature from his mother save a couple that made him valuable.
I have selected the best quotes from This Side of Paradise.
Table of Contents
This Side of Paradise Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“She is by no means a model character.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to criticise don’t blame yourself too much.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Each life unfulfilled, you see,
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired—been happy.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“It’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“He’s sensitive and I don’t want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn’t care about him.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“You are mine-you know you’re mine!” he cried wildly…the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened…the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“My imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“I was perhaps an egotist in youth, but i soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“A squalid phantasmagoria of breath” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“He lifted his arms to the crystaline, radiant sky. “I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
Other Related Book Quotes: A Confederacy of Dunces Quotes by John Kennedy Toole and The Dogs I Have Kissed Quotes by Trista Mateer
Quotes from This Side of Paradise
“Celtic you’ll live and Celtic you’ll die.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the last edge of twilight. The early moon had drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Summer has no day,’ she said. ‘We can’t possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name’s become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…it has no day.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“I have to be won all over again every time you see me” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Sometimes I wish I’d been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“You don’t know what a trial it is to be – like me. I’ve got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“The sea, he thought, had treasured its memories deeper than the faithless land.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“I’m a cynical idealist.’ He paused and wondered if that meant anything.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a failure.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
Best Side of Paradise Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“You’re not in love with me. You never wanted to marry me, did you?’ ‘It was the twilight,’ he said wonderingly.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“I’d rather keep it as a beautiful memory– tucked away in my heart.’ ‘Yes, women can do that– but not men. I’d remember always, not the beauty of it while it lasted, but just the bitterness, the long bitterness.’ ‘Don’t!” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“I can never judge a man while he’s talking” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and roared-really all the banalities about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time-time, that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Good luck to you and bad luck to your theories.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and café, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“The world is so overgrown that it can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger-” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
Top This Side of Paradise Quotes
“Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“I suppose all great happiness is a little sad.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Life cracked like ice!” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Another sigh came from the window– quite a resigned sigh. ‘She’s life and hope and happiness, my whole world now.’ He felt the quiver of a tear on his eyelid.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“It’s so hard to find a male to gratify one’s artistic taste” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“I don’t like girls in the daytime,’ he said shortly, and then thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: ‘But I like you.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I like you first and second and third.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“I’m romantic – a sentimental person thinks things will last – a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“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.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen…” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Dear, don’t think of getting out of bed yet. I’ve always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
Popular This Side of Paradise Quotes
“They proceeded with an infinite guile that would have horrified her parents.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Amory: I love you. Rosalind: I love you- now.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood – she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there’s sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-” ― F Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
“Again to you, most finite and most beautiful, and taste the stuff of half-remembered dreams, sweet and new on your mouth.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“He could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and contour.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“They don’t think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won’t see that if they don’t pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we’re going round and round in a circle.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
Thoughtful This Side of Paradise Quotes
“When the lightning strikes one of us, it strikes both” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“If one can’t be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to be a great criminal.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“And now Rosalind enters. Rosalind is– utterly Rosalind. She is one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them. Two types of men seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. All others are hers by natural prerogative.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want — not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable…’very few things matter and nothing matters very much” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
“Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise).
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