“I’m not sentimental—I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”

—

F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (via fitzgeraldquotes)

I really love this book. I also inextricably associate Fitzgerald with a super intense but very short-lived affair I had with a young man whose favorite author is Fitzgerald. He had beautiful eyes and good southern manners and too much to drink, and the way he looked at me out a window on the street made my whole body shake. In the dawn light of his bedroom I could see the regret on his face even before he stood and walked to the window. I could taste the damnation between us. We knew it wouldn’t last, our bodies were turning to dust around us, and in the darkness of a theater our hands touched in passing.