A review by yapxinyi
All the Sad Young Men by F. Scott Fitzgerald

4.0

Today's novels definitely don't write like him anymore! It was really fascinating to read how he was able to capture these young men's psyche, I enjoyed reading the part about heartbreak in "The Rich Boy", "Winter Dreams", and ""The Sensible Thing"". I particularly liked "Winter Dreams" – oh, the heartache he managed to convey in realising the magic is disappearing from the one you once loved and thought the world of!

He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at last - but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes.

The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him.

Ah, that feeling...

For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down and there was no beauty but the grey beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

I found it really intriguing you were pulled into these characters' worlds even for a few pages...

"Yes," he whispered into her lips. "There's all the time in the world..."

All the time in the world - his life and hers. But for an instant as he kissed her he knew that though he search through eternity he could never recapture those lost April hours. He might press her close now till the muscles knotted on his arms - she was something desirable and rare that he had fought for and made his own - but never again an intangible whisper in the dusk or on the breeze of night...

Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.

Funnily enough, the last story about "Gretchen's Forty Winks" reminded me Roald Dahl in the way the protagonist is able to get away with misdeeds and appear like the hero, with no repercussions.