Success Quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Charm, Fitzgerald suggests, is often just good lighting: it flatters the face until the room goes dark. "Taken out of their depths" is a deliberately physical phrase, turning social life into a body of water. In familiar territory, people float on rehearsed manners and inherited confidence; in the deep end, those graces stop being virtues and start being flotation devices. The line punctures the comforting idea that poise is character. Poise is circumstance.

The bite is in "no matter how charming a bluff they may put up". Fitzgerald is exquisitely attuned to performance - the curated laugh, the easy story, the practiced nonchalance - and to how quickly it curdles into panic when the script changes. A "bluff" is an act of control, but it also admits the absence of it. He implies that many people, especially the socially gifted, survive on a kind of aesthetic competence: looking like they belong. The moment they don't, the self they were selling collapses into raw reaction.

Contextually, this sits neatly inside Fitzgerald's Jazz Age ecosystem, where class mobility and self-invention are both promise and trap. His characters move through salons, hotels, and parties as if those spaces can confer identity. But the deeper test is psychological: money, romance, status - any of it can pull you into waters you can't actually swim. Fitzgerald's intent isn't to scold; it's to expose the fragile bargain between image and composure, and to remind us how thin the line is between dazzling and drowning.