This side of paradise

This is Fitzgerald’s debut novel. It was published when he was only 24. From the book, he was already very mature at that age, a very mature writer and a very mature man. The following are some quotes from the book. From these quotes, you can find an extremely perceptive man.

a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, (P 4)

She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude. (p 6)

New England, the land of schools. There were Andover and Exeter with their memories of New England dead … and a hundred others; all milling out their well-set-up, conventional, impressive type, year after year; (p. 18)

We have no Eton to create the self-consciousness of a governing class; (p 21)

social barriers as artificial distinctions made by the strong to bolster up their weak retainers and keep out the almost strong. (p 32)

"Yet when I see a happy family it makes me sick at my stomach—"

"Happy families try to make people feel that way," said Tom cynically. (p 219)

It's essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor. (p. 261)

There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes … Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing. The mystical reveries of saints that had once filled him with awe in the still hours of night, now vaguely repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom. The pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a world-old procession of Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans, Jesuits, Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like costumed alumni at a college reunion they streamed before him as their dreams, personalities, and creeds had in turn thrown colored lights on his soul; each had tried to express the glory of life and the tremendous significance of man; each had boasted of synchronizing what had gone before into his own rickety generalities; each had depended after all on the set stage and the convention of the theatre, which is that man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food. (p 268)

They say Bernard Shaw, in spite of his doctrines, is the most exacting of all dramatists about his royalties. To the last farthing. (p 283)