This Side of Paradise

by

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Amory Blaine Character Analysis

Amory Blaine is the protagonist of This Side of Paradise. Born to parents Beatrice and Stephen Blaine, Amory spends most of his childhood traveling around Europe and the United States with Beatrice. When he is 13, he goes to live with family in Minneapolis. Two years later, he is sent to St. Regis, a boarding school in Connecticut. He then attends Princeton University but leaves in his senior year to fight in World War I, where he serves as a bayonet instructor. After the war, he moves to New York City and lives in an apartment with Thomas Parke D’Invilliers and Alec Connage, two of his friends from Princeton. By the end of the novel, Amory finds himself alone and impoverished in New York. His roommates have both moved out, leaving Amory unable to afford rent. By this point, Amory’s mentor, Monsignor Darcy, and Amory’s parents have died, leaving him with little money. All of his romantic affairs have been unsuccessful, and he is companionless. Despite his unfortunate circumstances, Amory demonstrates remarkable personal growth over the course of the novel. Though in his youth Amory is haughty, self-involved, lazy, and cruel, by the end of the novel, he refocuses his energy on being a better, more trustworthy, and self-aware man.

Amory Blaine Quotes in This Side of Paradise

The This Side of Paradise quotes below are all either spoken by Amory Blaine or refer to Amory Blaine. 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:
Youth, Innocence, and Coming of Age Theme Icon
).
Book 1, Chapter 1: Amory, Son of Beatrice Quotes

Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to “pass” as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world. (… ) With this background did Amory drift into adolescence.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine
Page Number: 17-18
Explanation and Analysis:

Amory’s secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable to the slicker proper.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 32-33
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 2: Spires and Gargoyles Quotes

“Oh, it isn’t that I mind the glittering caste system,” admitted Amory. “I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I’ve got to be one of them.”

“But just now, Amory, you’re only a sweaty bourgeois.”

Amory lay for a moment without speaking.

“I won’t be—long,” he said finally. “But I hate to get anywhere by working for it. I’ll show the marks, don’t you know.”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Kerry Holiday (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine
Page Number: 67
Explanation and Analysis:

“No,” declared Tom emphatically, a new Tom, clothed by Brooks, shod by Franks, “I’ve won this game, but I feel as if I never want to play another. You’re all right—you’re a rubber ball, and somehow it suits you, but I’m sick of adapting myself to the local snobbishness of this corner of the world. I want to go where people aren’t barred because of the color of their neckties and the roll of their coats.”

Related Characters: Thomas Parke D’Invilliers (Tom) (speaker), Amory Blaine
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 77
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 3: The Egotist Considers Quotes

He became aware that he had not an ounce of real affection for Isabelle, but her coldness piqued him. He wanted to kiss her, kiss her a lot, because then he knew he could leave in the morning and not care. On the contrary, if he didn’t kiss her, it would worry him… It would interfere vaguely with his idea of himself as a conqueror.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Isabelle Borgé
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 84
Explanation and Analysis:

“A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and Sloane you tell me of evidently are. Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done. He’s a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.”

Related Characters: Monsignor Darcy (speaker), Amory Blaine, Kerry Holiday, Fred Sloane
Page Number: 95-96
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 4: Narcissus Off Duty Quotes

The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from the admiration he had had for Humbird[…]. Amory was struck by Burne’s intense earnestness[…]. Burne stood vaguely for a land Amory hoped he was drifting toward—and it was almost time that land was in sight.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Burne Holiday, Dick Humbird
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 112
Explanation and Analysis:

She was immemorial…. Amory wasn’t good enough for Clara, Clara of ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was above the prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of female virtue.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Rosalind Connage, Isabelle Borgé, Eleanor Savage, Clara Page
Page Number: 126
Explanation and Analysis:

“You know,” whispered Tom, “what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years. (…) And what we leave here is more than one class; it’s the whole heritage of youth. We’re just one generation—we’re breaking all the links that seemed to bind us here to top-booted and high-stocked generations.”

Related Characters: Thomas Parke D’Invilliers (Tom) (speaker), Amory Blaine
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:
Interlude: May, 1917 – February, 1919 Quotes

This is the end of one thing: for better or worse you will never again be quite the Amory Blaine that I knew, never again will we meet as we have met, because your generation is growing hard, much harder than mine ever grew, nourished as they were in the stuff of the nineties.

Related Characters: Monsignor Darcy (speaker), Amory Blaine
Page Number: 145
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 1: The Débutante Quotes

SHE: Well, Amory, you don’t mind—do you? When I meet a man that doesn’t bore me to death after two weeks, perhaps it’ll be different.

HE: Odd, you have the same point of view on men that I have on women.

SHE: I’m not really feminine, you know—in my mind.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Rosalind Connage (speaker)
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:

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. For the second time in his life Amory had a complete bouleversement and was hurrying into line with his generation.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Rosalind Connage
Page Number: 171
Explanation and Analysis:

ROSALIND: Amory, I’m yours—you know it. There have been times in the last month I’d have been completely yours if you’d said so. But I can’t marry you and ruin both our lives. (…) I can’t Amory, I can’t be shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you. You’d hate me in a narrow atmosphere. I’d make you hate me.

Related Characters: Rosalind Connage (speaker), Amory Blaine, Dawson Ryder
Page Number: 179
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 2: Experiments in Convalescence Quotes

“ ‘S a mental was’e,’ he insisted with his owl-like wisdom. “Two years my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los’ idealism, got be physcal anmal,” he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, “got be Prussian ‘bout ev’thing, women ‘specially. Use’ be straight ‘bout women college. Now don’givadam. (…) Seek pleasure where find it for to-morrow die. ‘At’s philosophy for me now on.”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Rosalind Connage
Page Number: 183
Explanation and Analysis:

Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature. He had later love-affairs, but of a different sort: in those he went back to that, perhaps, more typical frame of mind, in which the girl became the mirror of a mood in him.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Rosalind Connage, Eleanor Savage, Clara Page
Page Number: 191-2
Explanation and Analysis:

“[The war] certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation. (…) I’m not sure it didn’t kill it out of the whole world. Oh, Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader—and now even Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn’t be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger—”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Thomas Parke D’Invilliers (Tom)
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 3: Young Irony Quotes

Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Rosalind Connage, Isabelle Borgé, Eleanor Savage, Clara Page
Page Number: 204
Explanation and Analysis:

“Rotten, rotten old world,” broke out Eleanor suddenly, “and the wretchedest thing of all is me—oh, why am I a girl? (…) Here I am with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony.”

Related Characters: Eleanor Savage (speaker), Amory Blaine, Rosalind Connage, Dawson Ryder
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 4: The Supercilious Sacrifice Quotes

Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Alec Connage, Jill Wayne
Page Number: 228
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 5: The Egotist Becomes a Personage Quotes

Q.—What would be the test of corruption?

A.—Becoming really insincere—calling myself “not such a bad fellow,” thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it. 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. (…) I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker)
Page Number: 238
Explanation and Analysis:

Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: “Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.”

On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Monsignor Darcy, Stephen Blaine
Page Number: 245
Explanation and Analysis:

“Well,” said Amory, “I simply state that I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation—with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones.”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Mr. Ferrenby
Page Number: 256
Explanation and Analysis:

And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed…

He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.

“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker)
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 260
Explanation and Analysis:
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Amory Blaine Quotes in This Side of Paradise

The This Side of Paradise quotes below are all either spoken by Amory Blaine or refer to Amory Blaine. 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:
Youth, Innocence, and Coming of Age Theme Icon
).
Book 1, Chapter 1: Amory, Son of Beatrice Quotes

Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to “pass” as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world. (… ) With this background did Amory drift into adolescence.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine
Page Number: 17-18
Explanation and Analysis:

Amory’s secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable to the slicker proper.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 32-33
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 2: Spires and Gargoyles Quotes

“Oh, it isn’t that I mind the glittering caste system,” admitted Amory. “I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I’ve got to be one of them.”

“But just now, Amory, you’re only a sweaty bourgeois.”

Amory lay for a moment without speaking.

“I won’t be—long,” he said finally. “But I hate to get anywhere by working for it. I’ll show the marks, don’t you know.”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Kerry Holiday (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine
Page Number: 67
Explanation and Analysis:

“No,” declared Tom emphatically, a new Tom, clothed by Brooks, shod by Franks, “I’ve won this game, but I feel as if I never want to play another. You’re all right—you’re a rubber ball, and somehow it suits you, but I’m sick of adapting myself to the local snobbishness of this corner of the world. I want to go where people aren’t barred because of the color of their neckties and the roll of their coats.”

Related Characters: Thomas Parke D’Invilliers (Tom) (speaker), Amory Blaine
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 77
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 3: The Egotist Considers Quotes

He became aware that he had not an ounce of real affection for Isabelle, but her coldness piqued him. He wanted to kiss her, kiss her a lot, because then he knew he could leave in the morning and not care. On the contrary, if he didn’t kiss her, it would worry him… It would interfere vaguely with his idea of himself as a conqueror.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Isabelle Borgé
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 84
Explanation and Analysis:

“A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and Sloane you tell me of evidently are. Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done. He’s a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.”

Related Characters: Monsignor Darcy (speaker), Amory Blaine, Kerry Holiday, Fred Sloane
Page Number: 95-96
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 4: Narcissus Off Duty Quotes

The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from the admiration he had had for Humbird[…]. Amory was struck by Burne’s intense earnestness[…]. Burne stood vaguely for a land Amory hoped he was drifting toward—and it was almost time that land was in sight.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Burne Holiday, Dick Humbird
Related Symbols: The Slicker
Page Number: 112
Explanation and Analysis:

She was immemorial…. Amory wasn’t good enough for Clara, Clara of ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was above the prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of female virtue.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Rosalind Connage, Isabelle Borgé, Eleanor Savage, Clara Page
Page Number: 126
Explanation and Analysis:

“You know,” whispered Tom, “what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years. (…) And what we leave here is more than one class; it’s the whole heritage of youth. We’re just one generation—we’re breaking all the links that seemed to bind us here to top-booted and high-stocked generations.”

Related Characters: Thomas Parke D’Invilliers (Tom) (speaker), Amory Blaine
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:
Interlude: May, 1917 – February, 1919 Quotes

This is the end of one thing: for better or worse you will never again be quite the Amory Blaine that I knew, never again will we meet as we have met, because your generation is growing hard, much harder than mine ever grew, nourished as they were in the stuff of the nineties.

Related Characters: Monsignor Darcy (speaker), Amory Blaine
Page Number: 145
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 1: The Débutante Quotes

SHE: Well, Amory, you don’t mind—do you? When I meet a man that doesn’t bore me to death after two weeks, perhaps it’ll be different.

HE: Odd, you have the same point of view on men that I have on women.

SHE: I’m not really feminine, you know—in my mind.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Rosalind Connage (speaker)
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:

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. For the second time in his life Amory had a complete bouleversement and was hurrying into line with his generation.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Rosalind Connage
Page Number: 171
Explanation and Analysis:

ROSALIND: Amory, I’m yours—you know it. There have been times in the last month I’d have been completely yours if you’d said so. But I can’t marry you and ruin both our lives. (…) I can’t Amory, I can’t be shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you. You’d hate me in a narrow atmosphere. I’d make you hate me.

Related Characters: Rosalind Connage (speaker), Amory Blaine, Dawson Ryder
Page Number: 179
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 2: Experiments in Convalescence Quotes

“ ‘S a mental was’e,’ he insisted with his owl-like wisdom. “Two years my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los’ idealism, got be physcal anmal,” he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, “got be Prussian ‘bout ev’thing, women ‘specially. Use’ be straight ‘bout women college. Now don’givadam. (…) Seek pleasure where find it for to-morrow die. ‘At’s philosophy for me now on.”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Rosalind Connage
Page Number: 183
Explanation and Analysis:

Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature. He had later love-affairs, but of a different sort: in those he went back to that, perhaps, more typical frame of mind, in which the girl became the mirror of a mood in him.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Rosalind Connage, Eleanor Savage, Clara Page
Page Number: 191-2
Explanation and Analysis:

“[The war] certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation. (…) I’m not sure it didn’t kill it out of the whole world. Oh, Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader—and now even Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn’t be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger—”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Thomas Parke D’Invilliers (Tom)
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 3: Young Irony Quotes

Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Rosalind Connage, Isabelle Borgé, Eleanor Savage, Clara Page
Page Number: 204
Explanation and Analysis:

“Rotten, rotten old world,” broke out Eleanor suddenly, “and the wretchedest thing of all is me—oh, why am I a girl? (…) Here I am with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony.”

Related Characters: Eleanor Savage (speaker), Amory Blaine, Rosalind Connage, Dawson Ryder
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 4: The Supercilious Sacrifice Quotes

Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Alec Connage, Jill Wayne
Page Number: 228
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 5: The Egotist Becomes a Personage Quotes

Q.—What would be the test of corruption?

A.—Becoming really insincere—calling myself “not such a bad fellow,” thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it. 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. (…) I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker)
Page Number: 238
Explanation and Analysis:

Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: “Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.”

On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.

Related Characters: Amory Blaine, Monsignor Darcy, Stephen Blaine
Page Number: 245
Explanation and Analysis:

“Well,” said Amory, “I simply state that I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation—with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones.”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker), Mr. Ferrenby
Page Number: 256
Explanation and Analysis:

And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed…

He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.

“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”

Related Characters: Amory Blaine (speaker)
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 260
Explanation and Analysis: