Quotes from THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day... a sort of intellectual 'There!'"

"All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream."

Maury perturbed thus retorted to Richard's preference for writing over socializing, "Noble aesthete. And I poured alcohol into my stomach."

"Both were walking alone in a dispassionate garden with a ghost found in a dream."

"Halcyon days like boats drifting along slow-moving rivers; spring evenings full of a plaintive melancholy that made the past beautiful and bitter, bidding them look back and see that the loves of other summers long gone were dead with the forgotten waltzes of their years."

During a dinner out, one of Gloria's suitors Mr Bloeckman blurted, "When a man speaks he's mere tradition. He has at best a few thousand years back of him. But woman, why, she is the miraculous mouthpiece of posterity."

"There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses---bound for dust---mortal---."

"They plunged like divers into the dark eddying crowd and merging in the cool fifties sauntered to each other ... both were walking alone in a dispassionate garden with a ghost found in a dream."

"Intolerably unmoved they all seemed removed from any romantic imminency of action. Even Gloria's beauty needed wild emotions, needed poignancy, needed death. ..."

I found Gloria's simple confession (below) somewhere in the novel's Book 2, Chapter 3 quite pathetically suitable for today's common mood and posture...

"I don't care about truth. I want some happiness."

"Added to this was the wretched aura of stale wine, with it's inevitable suggestion of beauty gone foul and revelry remembered in disgust."

This fuckin' brilliantly written novel of the 1910s/1920s mirrors something too goddamn familiar in 2010s (per last quote above). The Voltairean beast advances physical well-being while strangely never electing beyond the feast, fuck and fight, that is, the seemingly "evil destiny" by disregard of the endowed divine image or mark, distinction among all other species, the soul, in brief and simplicity; the ability to emote and reason as well to instinctively behave, continuously, simultaneously. Thus from Voltaire's 1764 book Dictionnaire Philosophique...

Ye naked bipeds, without beaks or claws,

Hairless, and featherless, and tender-hided,

Weeping ye come into the world—because

Ye feel your evil destiny decided;

More to come...

Note:
As stated in another blog, I decided to forgo my long regarded personal studies in ethics, philosophy and economics (i.e. praxeology) for now, tempering my time spent reading poetry as well, in favor of reacquainting myself with the classic novels and writers of the early 20th century. It seems to be a necessary change, or at least desirable. With that said, I shall pursue writing poetry for books 9 (poetic mysteries) and 10 (essays/poems), with the latter as a metaphoric bookend of sorts... The book cover was the 1st edition, published in 1922 by Scribner's.

This blog...
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