F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, F. Scott Fitzgerald has a lot to say. In this list we present the 324 best F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes
I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I’m not sentimental–I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last–the romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won’t.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn’t beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
Ah, ” she cried, “you look so cool.” Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.You always look so cool, ” she repeated.She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
Think how you love me, ” she whispered. “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
You know I’m old in some ways-in others-well, I’m just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
They were still in the happier stage of love. 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.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, All the Sad Young Men
If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night & The Last Tycoon
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I learned a little of beauty– enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth…
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
I learned a little of beauty – enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth – and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
That’s going to be your trouble — judgment about yourself.(Tender is the Night)
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy — one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one – otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
You’ve got an awfully kissable mouth.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
It’s all life is. Just going ’round kissing people.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”–it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No–Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
For what it’s worth: it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement –discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
My God, ‘ he gasped, ‘you’re fun to kiss.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves – that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives – experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories – each time in a new disguise – maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
What are you going to do? “Can’t say – run for president, write -” “Greenwich Village?” “Good heavens, no – I said write – not drink.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Art invariably grows out of a period when, in general, the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Artistic temperament is like a king with vigor and unlimited opportunity. You shake the structure to pieces by playing with it.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself – art, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was safe now, free from all hysteria – he could accept what was acceptable, roam, grow, rebel, sleep deep through many nights…There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth – yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams…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.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths – so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I suppose that there’s a caddish streak in every man that runs crosswise across his character and disposition and general outlook.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Human sympathy has its limits.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world….The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Let us learn how to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead’ he suggested, ‘After that my own rule is to let everything alone’.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
There’s a writer for you, ” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon
For America is composed not of two sorts of people, but of two frames of mind – the first engaged in doing what is would like to do, the second pretending that such things do not exist.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
Breathing dreams like air
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
It was a curious day, slashed abruptly with fleeting, familiar impressions.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The attitude of the city on his action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city, but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial. He was completely indifferent to popular opinion.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Then she added in a sort of childish delight: ‘We’ll be poor, won’t we? Like people in books. And I’ll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!’ She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss.’It’s impossible to be both together, ‘ said John grimly. ‘People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two…
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Other Stories
. . . confirmed libertines don’t reform until they’re tired . . .
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Offshore Pirate
They always believe that ‘things are in a bad way now, ‘ but they ‘haven’t any faith in these idealists.’ One minute they call Wilson ‘just a dreamer, not practical’- a year later they rail at him for making his dreams realities. They haven’t clear logical ideas on one single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all change. They don’t think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won’t see that if they don’t pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we’re going round and round in a circle. That- is the great middle class.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Communism as I see it has no place in the United States, and the American people will not stand for its teachings.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The important thing is that you should not argue with them [Communists]….Whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind, ‘Fascist, ’ ‘Liberal, ’ ‘Trotskyist, ’ and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Communism…muat of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence
I don’t think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories
He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams
It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
When I see a beautiful shell like that I can’t help feeling a regret about what’s inside it.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I’ve got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Aristocracy’s only an admission that certain traits which we call fine – courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing – can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don’t have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful — then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten remoteness of the afternoon.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Art isn’t meaningless… It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible, ” come true.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Writers aren’t exactly people…. They’re a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Courage is a sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I want excitement; and I don’t care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am glad you are happy–but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I’ll drink your champagne. I’ll drink every drop of it, I don’t care if it kills me.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
That we shall use every discovery of science in the preservation of our children’s health goes without saying; but we shall do more than this – we shall give them a free start, not loading them up with our own ideas and experiences, nor advising them to live according to our lights. We were burned in the fire here and there, but – who knows? – fire may not burn our children, and if we warn them away from it they may end by never growing warm. We will not even inflict our cynicism on them as the sentimentality of our fathers was inflicted on us. The most we will do is urge a little doubt, asking that the doubt be exercised on our ideas as well as on all the mortal things in this world.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one’s unwanted children. What a fate – to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers. …Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man’s world–they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
I mean the women who, without any of the prerogatives of youth and beauty, demand continual slavery from their men….They sit back complacently and watch their husbands slave for them; and, without furnishing any of the pleasantries of life for their husbands, they demand the sort of continual attention that a charming fiancée might get….They are harridans and shrews who continually nag and scold until the men are driven idiotic.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, “a constant striving” (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it) only adds to this unhappiness in the end–that end that comes to our youth and hope.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
A fellow has to believe in something, Jay-such as the rottenness of humanity.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds….it is an absolute fact—so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
She walked rather quickly; she liked to be active, though at times she gave an impression of repose that was at once static and evocative. This was because she knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent, contributing just her share of urbane humor with a precision that approached meagreness. But at the moment when strangers tended to grow uncomfortable in the presence of this economy she would seize the topic and rush off with it, feverishly surprised with herself– then bring it back and relinquish it abruptly, almost timidly, like an obedient retriever, having been adequate and something more.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
In the morning you were never violently sorry– you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories
I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations — with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country — contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness — hating the night when I couldn’t sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
It was too late – everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow’s, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath – and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light – light dividing like pearls – forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
The sea, he thought, had treasured it’s memories deeper than the faithless land.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
The tears coursed down her cheeks- not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy — why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, On Booze
Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there’s sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other’s presence, a new serenity.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Men don’t often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon
I detest these underdone men, he thought coldly. Boiled looking! Ought to be shoved back in the oven; just one more minute would do it.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Always, after he was in bed, there were voices – indefinite, fading, enchanting – just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorites waking dreams.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
I lived here once, ” the author said after a moment.”Here? For a long time?””No. For just a little while when I was young.””It must have been rather cramped.””I didn’t notice.””Would you like to try it again?””No. And I couldn’t if I wanted to.”He shivered slightly and closed the windows. As they went downstairs, the visitor said, half apologetically: “It’s really just like all houses, isn’t it?”The author nodded.”I didn’t think it was when I built it, but in the end I suppose it’s just like other houses after all.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
…he told me all the things he liked to THINK he thought in the misty past.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain…
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops – nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked – people didn’t get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully – assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life — I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved — in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
…I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved – and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact – and rather deeply wise. More than that, what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Cather’s: “We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wouldn’t ask too much of her, ‘ I ventured. ‘You can’t change the past.”Can’t change the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I wouldn’t ask too much of her, ” I ventured. “You can’t change the past.””Can’t change the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
no girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it’s every girl for herself.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
She didn’t like it, ” he said immediately.”Of course she did.””She didn’t like it, ” he insisted. “She didn’t have a good time.”He was silent and I guessed at his unutterable depression.”I feel far away from her, ” he said. “It’s hard to make her understand.””You mean about the dance?””The dance?” He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. “Old sport, the dance is unimportant.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
We’ll all be failures?””Yes. I don’t mean only money failures, but just sort of – of ineffectual and sad, and – oh, how can I tell you?
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know–because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated a surrender with equanimity. Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him – like an actor kissed in a picture.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Under the glass porte-cochère of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became grey and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxicabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Understand now, I’m purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I just think of people, ” she continued, “whether they seem right where they are and fit into a picture. I don’t mind if they don’t do anything. I don’t see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when people do anything.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you–it’s a wall that an active you runs up against.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The present was the thing–work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn … No — Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
That most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man”.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby & 1984
I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
I wish I had done everything on earth with you
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don’t like this kiss-and-forget.”But I don’t want to argue. I think it’s wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can’t it’ll be time to argue.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life–not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Offshore Pirate
Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. …He aspires to create new and original works. His way is alone. If he succumbs to ideologies, he turns into a mouthpiece. He must hang on to his identity for dear life. In the end he must rely on his own judgment. It’s the only way to survive as a writer and an artist.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
You’re three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance – that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it – then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
This is all. It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn’t do – and wouldn’t last.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Character is plot, plot is character.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Never miss a party…good for the nerves–like celery.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
He found that the business of optimism was no mean task.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it’s carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
It’s only when the settlement work has gone on for months that one realizes how bad things are. As our secretary said to me, your finger-nails never seem dirty until you wash your hands.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age
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.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Her fine high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet and shining, the colour of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood — she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis – these had been his ingredients when he entered St. Regis’. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay to conceal the “Amory plus Beatrice” from the ferreting eyes of a boarding school, so St. Regis’ had very painfully drilled Beatrice out of him and begun to lay down new and more conventional planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis’ and Amory were unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself changed. Those qualities for which he had suffered: his moodiness, his tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the “St. Regis’ Tattler”; it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very vanities that had not long ago been contemptible weaknesses.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ — and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing — oh, that eternal hand!— a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
He was good looking, “sort of distinguished when he wants to be”, had a line, and was properly inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environment led her to desire
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
The grass is full of ghosts tonight.’ ‘The whole campus is alive with them.’ They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees. ‘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.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved – to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that…
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness – the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
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. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood, she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That’s what’s called ingenuousness.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely—taking almost a delight in the thrust. Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say. Often he would eventually trace these portentous reticences to some physical discomfort—of these she never complained until they were over—or to some carelessness or presumption in him, or to an unsatisfactory dish at dinner, but even then the means by which she created the infinite distances she spread about herself were a mystery, buried somewhere back in those twenty-two years of unwavering pride.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
In April war was declared with Germany. Wilson and his cabinet—a cabinet that in its lack of distinction was strangely reminiscent of the twelve apostles—let loose the carefully starved dogs of war, and the press began to whoop hysterically against the sinister morals, sinister philosophy, and sinister music produced by the Teutonic temperament. Those who fancied themselves particularly broad-minded made the exquisite distinction that it was only the German Government which aroused them to hysteria; the rest were worked up to a condition of retching indecency. Any song which contained the word “mother” and the word “kaiser” was assured of a tremendous success. At last every one had something to talk about—and almost every one fully enjoyed it, as though they had been cast for parts in a sombre and romantic play.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside his bed in the hotel tolling frantically, and remembered that he had left word to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily, his clothes in a pile by his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast in silence, and then sauntered out to get some air. Amory’s mind was working slowly, trying to assimilate what had happened and separate from the chaotic imagery that stacked his memory the bare shreds of truth. If the morning had been cold and gray he could have grasped the reins of the past in an instant, but it was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in May, when the air of Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine. How much or how little Sloane remembered Amory did not care to know; he apparently had none of the nervous tension that was gripping Amory and forcing his mind back and forth like a shrieking saw.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
My courage is faith–faith in the eternal resilience of me–that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I’ve got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide–not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I’ve been through hell without a whine quite often–and the female hell is deadlier than the male.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
Rather nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?” –
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power – to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin – the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair…Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
My own rule is to let everything alone.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table–the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
All I think of ever is that I love you.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
One o’ clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping sentences of an enraptured man. Four o’clock: her little feet moving to melody, her face distinct in the crowd, her partner happy as a petted puppy and mad as the immemorial hatter…
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
She was one of those people who are famous beyond their actual achievement.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis– a moulding of the confusion of life into form.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Bowl
The movies remind me of the Triangle Club at Princeton. I used to belong to it, and we always started out firm in our decision to create new and startling things. We always ended up by producing the same old show. In the beginning, our enthusiasm and ideals discarded as rubbish all the old fossilized plots.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Thirty–the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual «There!» yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Whether it’s something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday I must start out with an emotion, one that’s close to me and that I can understand.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they’ve hit a sentence or two in a ‘dangerous book’ that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they’re the congressmen you can’t bribe, the Presidents who aren’t politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren’t just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality – he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
A man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon
You don’t write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief- that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never…intended. So they said to one another: “Let’s join together and make a great book that will last forever that will mock the credulity of man…We’ll include all the most preposterous old wives’ tales now current. We’ll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, yet so weakly human that he’ll become a byword for laughter the world over- and we’ll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he’ll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there’ll be no more nonsense in the world.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
If the bonus army conquered Washington the lawyer had a boat hidden in the Sacramento River, and he was going to row upstream for a few months and then come back “because they always needed lawyers after a revolution to straighten out all the legal side.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed–the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Most of the big shore places were closed now. And there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of the ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away till gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes, A fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. For a transitory, enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent. Face to face, for the last time in history, with something commensurate to its capacity for wonder.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe – why, intelligence never built a steam-engine! Circumstances built a steam-engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
It’s always a delusion when I see what you don’t want to see (Nicole to Dick).
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
C’mon, Amory. Your romance is overYou don’t know how true you spoke. No idea. ‘At’s the whole trouble
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes… He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrap-book of his life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes…
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Take off that darn fur coat!…Or maybe you’d like to have us open all the windows.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
I’ve always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bernice Bobs Her Hair
Deep in his heart, he wondered if he was after all worse than this man or the next. He knew that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the result of circumstances and environment; that often when he raged at himself as an egotist something would whisper ingratiatingly: “No. Genius!
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writers aren’t exactly people, they’re a bunch of people trying to be one person.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else’s clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories
That’s the whole burden of this novel – the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children’s eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea–if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers
…and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.It is somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Whenever you feel like criticzing any one, ” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven´t had the advantages that you’ve had.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
She was appalled by West Egg’s raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that eroded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man , more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. ‘How do you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helplessly. I told him. Ans as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He has casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken…
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Understand now, I’m purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
There was a kindliness about intoxication – there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
We can’t possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name’s become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
And then, one fairy night, May became June.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water, Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light, Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter…Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.Walking alone…was it splendor, or what, we were bound with?Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground withTapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora’s box.Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City: Personal Essays 1920-40
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool–that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
No, ” interrupted Marcia emphatically. “And you’re a sweet boy. Come here and kiss me.”Horace stopped quickly in front of her.”Why do you want me to kiss you?” he asked intently. “Do you just go round kissing people?””Why, yes, ” admitted Marcia, unruffled. “‘At’s all life is. Just going around kissing people.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
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. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood – she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I became bored – that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity, to our infinite disappointment. It won’t be Joan’s [Joan Crawford’s] next picture and we are setting it aside awhile till we can think of a way of halfwitting halfwit Hayes and his legion of decency. Pictures needed cleaning up in 1932-33…but because they were suggestive and salacious. Of course the moralists now want to apply that to all strong themes—so the crop of the last two years is feeble and false, unless it deals with children.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Isn’t Hollywood a dump — in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I don’t ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
America is a willingness of the heart.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
No grand idea was ever born in a conference but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
First you take a drink then the drink takes a drink then the drink takes you.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
One should … be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Grow up and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writers aren’t exactly people they’re a whole lot of people trying to be one person.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane… There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Forgotten is forgiven.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The victor belongs to the spoils.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
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