This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Semantics:
"Don't let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your 'personality,' as you persist in calling it; 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 pm."
" 'Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid.' "
"Amory: I was in love with a people once.
Rosalind: So?
Amory: Oh, yes--her name was Isabelle--nothing at all to her except what I read into her."
" 'The sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.' "
" '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.' "
Syntax:
"All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified--their senses of humor crawled into corners to sleep; their former love affairs seemed faintly laughable and scarcely regretted juvenalia."
"He looks around helplessly as if searching for new words to clothe an old, shop-worn phrase."
"The stars were long gone and there were let only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homeward and let new lights come in with the sun."
