Tender Is the Night

Tender Is the Night

by

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Tender Is the Night makes teaching easy.

Dick Diver Character Analysis

The story’s protagonist is a charismatic American expatriate living in France with his wife, Nicole, and their two children, Lanier and Topsy. Dick is attractive and charming, and his magnetism draws interesting and unusual people towards him. He is known for throwing wild parties and possesses a wonderful gift for making those around him feel special and understood. Dick left the United States during World War I, moving to Zurich in 1917 to pursue a career is psychiatry. As a young man, Dick was ambitious and promising, embodying the American dream itself. His career suffered, however, after marrying Nicole Warren, a psychiatric patient troubled by schizophrenia. Her medical condition confines Dick to the role of doctor and caregiver, and he struggles to achieve any professional success. Hopelessly attracted to youth and beauty, Dick engages in a brief love affair with Rosemary Hoyt, a young actress whom he meets by chance on the French Riviera. After years of excessive drinking, Dick struggles to juggle his feelings for Rosemary with his commitments to Nicole, and his health suffers. Dick’s steady decline, and his deterioration into the clutches of depression and alcoholism, symbolize the failure of the American dream. Unable to reach his professional potential, or sustain his romantic relationships with either Rosemary or Nicole, Dick is forced to return to America—failed, alone, and relatively poor.

Dick Diver Quotes in Tender Is the Night

The Tender Is the Night quotes below are all either spoken by Dick Diver or refer to Dick Diver. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Excess, Destruction, and the Failed American Dream Theme Icon
).
Book 1, Chapter 4 Quotes

Her naïveté responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world’s bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 6 Quotes

“I want to give a really bad party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”

Related Characters: Dick Diver (speaker), Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Mrs. Abrams
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:

He sometimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust […] But to be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience […] He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world. So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all-inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 9 Quotes

“You were brought up to work—not especially to marry. Now you’ve found your first nut to crack and it’s a good nut—go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him—whatever happens it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl.”

Related Characters: Mrs. Elsie Speers (speaker), Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Page Number: 51
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 17 Quotes

They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Mrs. Elsie Speers
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 19 Quotes

However, everything had happened—Abe’s departure and Mary’s impending departure for Salzburg this afternoon had ended the time in Paris. Or perhaps the shots, the concussions that had finished God knew what dark matter, had terminated it. The shots had entered into all their lives: echoes of violence followed them out onto the pavement where two porters held a post-mortem beside them as they waited for a taxi.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Abe North, Mary North, Maria Wallis
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 20 Quotes

Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary’s cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.

—Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

—Please do. It’s too light in here.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt, Collis Clay, Hillis
Related Symbols: The Blinds in the Train
Page Number: 113
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 21 Quotes

“Look, I’m in an extraordinary condition about you. When a child can disturb a middle-aged gent—things get difficult.”

“You’re not middle-aged, Dick—you’re the youngest person in the world.”

Related Characters: Dick Diver (speaker), Rosemary Hoyt (speaker)
Page Number: 119
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 25 Quotes

“Look here, you mustn’t get upset over this—it’s only some nigger scrap.”

Related Characters: Dick Diver (speaker), Rosemary Hoyt, Abe North, Jules Peterson
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 5 Quotes

Nicole took advantage of this to stand up and the impression of her youth and beauty grew on Dick until it welled up inside him in a compact paroxysm of emotion. She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 8 Quotes

“But I will carry you down in my arms,” Marmora protested intensely. “I will roller-skate you—or I will throw you and you will fall slowly like a feather.”

The delight in Nicole’s face—to be a feather again instead of a plummet, to float and not to drag. She was a carnival to watch—at times primly coy, posing, grimacing and gesturing—sometimes the shadow fell and the dignity of old suffering flowed down into her fingertips.

Related Characters: Conte di Marmora (speaker), Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 193
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 10 Quotes

Dick, why did you register Mr. and Mrs. Diver instead of Doctor and Mrs. Diver? I just wondered—it just floated through my mind.—You’ve taught me that work is everything and I believe you. You used to say a man knows things and when he stops knowing things he’s like anybody else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things. If you want to turn things topsy-turvy, all right, but must your Nicole follow you walking on her hands, darling?

Related Characters: Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren) (speaker), Dick Diver, Lanier and Topsy Diver
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 209
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 11 Quotes

As an indifference cherished, or left to atrophy, becomes an emptiness, to this extent he had learned to become empty of Nicole, serving her against his will with negations and emotional neglect.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 12 Quotes

His work became confused with Nicole’s problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast of late that it seemed to belittle his work.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Page Number: 241
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 13 Quotes

“We must think it over carefully—” and the unsaid lines back of that: “We own you, and you’ll admit it sooner or later. It is absurd to keep up the pretence of independence.”

Related Characters: Beth (Baby) Warren (speaker), Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Franz Gregorovious
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 230
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 15 Quotes

She was laughing hilariously, unashamed, unafraid, unconcerned. No one coming on the scene would have imagined that she had caused it; she laughed as after some mild escape of childhood.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Lanier and Topsy Diver, Mr. Devereux Warren
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 249
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 20 Quotes

For three years Dick had been the ideal by which Rosemary measured other men and inevitably his stature had increased to heroic size. She did not want him to be like other men, yet here were the same exigent demands, as if he wanted to take some of herself away, carry it off in his pocket.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt
Page Number: 274
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3, Chapter 7 Quotes

For what might occur thereafter she had no anxiety—she suspected that that would be the lifting of a burden, an unblinding of eyes. Nicole had been designed for change, for flight, with money as fins and wings. The new state of things would be no more than if a racing chassis, concealed for years under the body of a family limousine, should be stripped to its original self. Nicole could feel the fresh breeze already—the wrench it was she feared, and the dark manner of its coming.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Page Number: 357
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3, Chapter 8 Quotes

A little later, riding toward Nice, she thought: So I have white crook’s eyes, have I? Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.

Related Characters: Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren) (speaker), Dick Diver, Tommy Barban
Page Number: 373
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3, Chapter 10 Quotes

On an almost parallel occasion, back in Dohmler’s clinic on the Zürichsee, realizing this power, he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to be brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved. So it had been.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Mary North, Lady Caroline Sibly Biers, Professor Dohmler
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 384
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3, Chapter 13 Quotes

Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant’s in Galena; his latest note was postmarked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Tommy Barban
Page Number: 402
Explanation and Analysis:
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Tender Is the Night PDF

Dick Diver Quotes in Tender Is the Night

The Tender Is the Night quotes below are all either spoken by Dick Diver or refer to Dick Diver. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Excess, Destruction, and the Failed American Dream Theme Icon
).
Book 1, Chapter 4 Quotes

Her naïveté responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world’s bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 6 Quotes

“I want to give a really bad party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”

Related Characters: Dick Diver (speaker), Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Mrs. Abrams
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:

He sometimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust […] But to be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience […] He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world. So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all-inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 9 Quotes

“You were brought up to work—not especially to marry. Now you’ve found your first nut to crack and it’s a good nut—go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him—whatever happens it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl.”

Related Characters: Mrs. Elsie Speers (speaker), Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Page Number: 51
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 17 Quotes

They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Mrs. Elsie Speers
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 19 Quotes

However, everything had happened—Abe’s departure and Mary’s impending departure for Salzburg this afternoon had ended the time in Paris. Or perhaps the shots, the concussions that had finished God knew what dark matter, had terminated it. The shots had entered into all their lives: echoes of violence followed them out onto the pavement where two porters held a post-mortem beside them as they waited for a taxi.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Abe North, Mary North, Maria Wallis
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 20 Quotes

Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary’s cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.

—Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

—Please do. It’s too light in here.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt, Collis Clay, Hillis
Related Symbols: The Blinds in the Train
Page Number: 113
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 21 Quotes

“Look, I’m in an extraordinary condition about you. When a child can disturb a middle-aged gent—things get difficult.”

“You’re not middle-aged, Dick—you’re the youngest person in the world.”

Related Characters: Dick Diver (speaker), Rosemary Hoyt (speaker)
Page Number: 119
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 25 Quotes

“Look here, you mustn’t get upset over this—it’s only some nigger scrap.”

Related Characters: Dick Diver (speaker), Rosemary Hoyt, Abe North, Jules Peterson
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 5 Quotes

Nicole took advantage of this to stand up and the impression of her youth and beauty grew on Dick until it welled up inside him in a compact paroxysm of emotion. She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 8 Quotes

“But I will carry you down in my arms,” Marmora protested intensely. “I will roller-skate you—or I will throw you and you will fall slowly like a feather.”

The delight in Nicole’s face—to be a feather again instead of a plummet, to float and not to drag. She was a carnival to watch—at times primly coy, posing, grimacing and gesturing—sometimes the shadow fell and the dignity of old suffering flowed down into her fingertips.

Related Characters: Conte di Marmora (speaker), Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 193
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 10 Quotes

Dick, why did you register Mr. and Mrs. Diver instead of Doctor and Mrs. Diver? I just wondered—it just floated through my mind.—You’ve taught me that work is everything and I believe you. You used to say a man knows things and when he stops knowing things he’s like anybody else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things. If you want to turn things topsy-turvy, all right, but must your Nicole follow you walking on her hands, darling?

Related Characters: Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren) (speaker), Dick Diver, Lanier and Topsy Diver
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 209
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 11 Quotes

As an indifference cherished, or left to atrophy, becomes an emptiness, to this extent he had learned to become empty of Nicole, serving her against his will with negations and emotional neglect.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 12 Quotes

His work became confused with Nicole’s problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast of late that it seemed to belittle his work.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Page Number: 241
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 13 Quotes

“We must think it over carefully—” and the unsaid lines back of that: “We own you, and you’ll admit it sooner or later. It is absurd to keep up the pretence of independence.”

Related Characters: Beth (Baby) Warren (speaker), Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Franz Gregorovious
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 230
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 15 Quotes

She was laughing hilariously, unashamed, unafraid, unconcerned. No one coming on the scene would have imagined that she had caused it; she laughed as after some mild escape of childhood.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Lanier and Topsy Diver, Mr. Devereux Warren
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 249
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 20 Quotes

For three years Dick had been the ideal by which Rosemary measured other men and inevitably his stature had increased to heroic size. She did not want him to be like other men, yet here were the same exigent demands, as if he wanted to take some of herself away, carry it off in his pocket.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt
Page Number: 274
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3, Chapter 7 Quotes

For what might occur thereafter she had no anxiety—she suspected that that would be the lifting of a burden, an unblinding of eyes. Nicole had been designed for change, for flight, with money as fins and wings. The new state of things would be no more than if a racing chassis, concealed for years under the body of a family limousine, should be stripped to its original self. Nicole could feel the fresh breeze already—the wrench it was she feared, and the dark manner of its coming.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Rosemary Hoyt, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren)
Page Number: 357
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3, Chapter 8 Quotes

A little later, riding toward Nice, she thought: So I have white crook’s eyes, have I? Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.

Related Characters: Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren) (speaker), Dick Diver, Tommy Barban
Page Number: 373
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3, Chapter 10 Quotes

On an almost parallel occasion, back in Dohmler’s clinic on the Zürichsee, realizing this power, he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to be brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved. So it had been.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Mary North, Lady Caroline Sibly Biers, Professor Dohmler
Related Symbols: The Sanitarium
Page Number: 384
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3, Chapter 13 Quotes

Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant’s in Galena; his latest note was postmarked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.

Related Characters: Dick Diver, Nicole Diver (Nicole Warren), Tommy Barban
Page Number: 402
Explanation and Analysis: