The Beautiful and Damned F.Scott Fitzgerald Why I find Fitzgerald to be beautiful but so generally sad:

• on relative beauty "He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful - then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards."
• DICK: Art isn't meaningless. MAURY: It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.
• BEAUTY: (With a faint laugh which disturbs only momentarily the immobility of her lips) And will I like being a jazz-baby? THE VOICE: (Soberly) You will love it...
• "'...you don't think the artist works from his intelligence?' 'No. He goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him what constitutes material.'"
• "'She's sparkling, Aunt Catherine,' said Richard pleasantly. 'A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty.'"
• on marriage "Fifteen years of yes's had beaten Mrs. Gilbert. Fifteen further years of that incessant unaffirmative affirmative, accompanied by the perpetual flicking of ash-mushrooms from thirty-two thousand cigars, had broken her... She told herself that the years had brought her tolerance - actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed of moral courage."
• "They were in love with generalities."
• on youth and beauty "'...but he says the biography of every woman begins with the first kiss that counts, and ends when her last child is laid in her arms.' 'He says that unloved women have no biographies - they have histories.'"
• "I've got a streak of what you'd call cheapness. I don't know where I get it but it's - oh, things like this and bright colors and gaudy vulgarity. I seem to belong here. These people could appreciate me and take me for granted, and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas the clever men I meet would just analyze me and tell me I'm this because of this or that because of that."
• on aging "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... The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory."
• a twisted integrity "She would never blame him for being the ineffectual idler so long as he did it sincerely, from the attitude that nothing was worth doing."