F Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

I'm afraid I'm in love with you and that's not the best thing that could happen.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

Think of all the fine men we should lose is suicide were not so cowardly

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.

When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he pondered o'er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death:
"Thru Time I'll save my love!" he said ... yet Beauty vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead ...
-Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair:
"Who'd learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet there" ... So all my words, however true, might sing you to a thousandth June, and no one ever know that you were Beauty for an afternoon.

It'd be a good setting to jump overboard,' said Dick mildly.
'Wouldn't it?' agreed Nicole hastily. 'Let's borrow life-preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.

I'll tell you God's truth. His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by.

Is your underwear purple, too?

There was the sun, letting down great glowing masses of heat; there was life, active and snarling, moving about them like a fly swarm - the dark pants of smoke from the engine, a crisp "all aboard!" and a bell ringing. Confusedly Maury saw eyes in the milk train staring curiously up at him, heard Gloria and Anthony in quick controversy as to whether he should go to the city with her, then another clamor and she was gone and the three men, pale as ghosts, were standing alone upon the platform while a grimy coal-heaver went down the road on top of a motor truck, carolling hoarsely at the summer morning. CHAPTER

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

He drew her very tenderly close and their lips met like starved hearts.

Her hair, drawn back off her ears, brushed her shoulders in such a way that the face seemed to have just emerged from it, as if this were the exact moment when she was coming from a wood into clear moonlight. The unknown yielded her up; Dick wished she had no background, that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from which she had come.

Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.

The sign of intelligence is the ability to carry opposed thoughts at the same time.

Can't repeat the past?…Why of course you can!

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 romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won't.

Slowly she spread her arms and stood there swan-like, radiating a pride in her young perfection that lit a warm glow in Carlyle's heart. "We're going through the black air with our arms wide," she called, "and our feet straight out behind like a dolphin's tail, and we're going to think we'll never hit the silver down there till suddenly it'll be all warm round us and full of little kissing, caressing waves." Then she was in the air, and Carlyle involuntarily held his breath. He had not realized that the dive was nearly forty feet. It seemed an eternity before he heard the swift compact sound as she reached the sea. And it was with his glad sigh of relief when her light watery laughter curled up the side of the cliff and into his anxious ears that he knew he loved her.

It was touching to see them together - it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way.

I found her as lovable as a cheap old toy. She

Faces swirled about him, a kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin- too fat, too lean, yet floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm passionate breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious.

The two basic stories of all times are Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer-the charm of women and the courage of men.

He considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.

Thirty
the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

It was Sunday
not a day, but rather a gap between two other days.

You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn't to drive at all." "I am careful." "No, you're not." "Well, other people are," she said lightly. "What's that got to do with it?" "They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an accident.

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.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

If you're in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.

He fought with a desire to kiss her again, even tenderly, and began to tell her that she was being unwise, but before he got really started at this handsome project, she was in his arms again, and whispering something that he had to accept, since it was wrapped up in a kiss.

Always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
quoted by Evan Osnos to describe the rapidly urbanising China

I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition ... .

To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless ratiocination of subject - of endless trying to dig out the essential truth, the essential justice. As a first premise you have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without the conscience, you are just one of many thousands of journalists.

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.

Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. - The Great Gatsby.

One should ... be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

In perspective it was tremendous

It seemed a tragedy to want nothing - and yet he wanted something, something. He knew in flashes what it was - some path of hope to lead him toward what he thought was an imminent and ominous old age.

I could settle down if women were different," he said. "If I didn't understand so much about them, if women didn't spoil you for other women, if they had only a little pride. If I could go to sleep for a while and wake up into a home that was really mine - why, that's what I'm made for, Paula, that's what women have seen in me and liked in me. It's only that I can't get through the preliminaries any more.

Girls like you are responsible for all the tiresome colorless marriages; all those ghastly inefficiencies that pass as feminine qualities. What a blow it must be when a man with imagination marries the beautiful bundle of clothes that he's been building ideals around, and finds that she's just a weak, whining, cowardly mass of affectations!

There was suddenly no question on his mind, no eternal problem for a solution and resolution. He had experienced an emotion that was neither mental nor physical, nor merely a mixture of the two, and the love of life absorbed him for the present to the exclusion of all else. He was content to let the experiment remain isolated and unique.

Back at two o'clock in the Roi George corridor the beauty of Nicole had been the beauty of Rosemary as the beauty of Leonardo's girl was to that of the girl of an illustrator. Dick moved on through the rain, demoniac and frightened, the passions of many men inside him and nothing simple that he could see.

Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!

He was consumed with wonder by her presence.

there's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--"
a small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful of banana peels, flung them valiantly in the direction of the potomac.

Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.

It's so hard to find a male to gratify one's artistic tastes.

She illustrated very simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the procedure, and presently Rosemary would try to imitate it.

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

Dick got up to Zurich on less Achilles' heels than would be required to equip a centipede, but with plenty - the illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the essential goodness of people; illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers who had to croon falsely, that there were no wolves outside the cabin door.

As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm.
'You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man.' She narrowed her eyes and shivered.

It was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved
so easy to be loved
so hard to love.

No ... no ... We never forgive those we can understand ... We can only forgive those who wound us for no reason at all ...

The odd thing is that I'm in love with you anyhow.

No, no, it's not me, it's them - that old time that I've tried to have live in me. These were just men, unimportant evidently or they wouldn't have been 'unknown'; but they died for the most beautiful thing in the world - the dead South. You see," she continued, her voice still husky, her eyes glistening with tears, "people have these dreams they fasten onto things, and I've always grown up with that dream. It was so easy because it was all dead and there weren't any disillusions comin' to me. I've tried in a way to live up to those past standards of noblesse oblige - there's just the last remnants of it, you know, like the roses of an old garden dying all round us - streaks of strange courtliness and chivalry in some of these boys an' stories I used to hear from a Confederate soldier who lived next door, and a few old darkies. Oh, Harry, there was something, there was something! I couldn't ever make you understand but it was there.

Sometimes I don't know whether Zelda and I are real or just characters in one of my novels.

I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes-there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.

I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before,' he said, nodding determinedly. 'She'll see.

Clark," she said softly, "I wouldn't change you for the world.
You're sweet the way you are. The things that'll make you fail
I'll love always
the living in the past, the lazy days and
nights you have, and all your carelessness and generosity.

He's quite as nervously broken down as I am, but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.

Life was a damned muddle ... a football game with every one off-side and the referee gotten rid of - every one claiming the referee would have been on his side ...

It occurred to him that all strongly accentuated classes, such as the military, divided men into two kinds: their own kind--and those without. To the clergyman there were clergy and laity, to the Catholic there were Catholics and non-Catholics, to the negro there were blacks and whites, to the prisoner there were the imprisoned and the free, and to the sick man there were the sick and the well.... So, without thinking of it once in his lifetime, he had been a civilian, a layman, a non-Catholic, a Gentile, white, free, and well....

I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed.

That's going to be your trouble - judgment about yourself.
(Tender is the Night)

Sleep - real sleep, the dear, the cherished one, the lullaby. So deep and warm the bed and the pillow enfolding me, letting me sink into peace, nothingness - my dreams now, after the catharsis of the dark hours, are of young and lovely people doing young, lovely things, the girls I knew once, with big brown eyes, real yellow hair.

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.

Her voice is full of money, ...
That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money- that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it ... High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl ...

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.

Sweetness is hard.
Real sweetness is a sort of hardness - and strength.

~Lois

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

The room rang full of her artificial laughter.

His expression combined that of a Middle-western farmer appraising his wheat-crop and that of an actor wondering whether he is observed - the public manner of all good Americans.

Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

Now you've a clean start ... you've brushed three or four ornaments down, and in a fit of pique knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting, the better, but remember, do the next thing.

It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.

Sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal.

These things excite me so,' she whispered. 'If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I'll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a green card.

But his eyes, dimmed by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.

I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter. 'I suppose she talks, she eats, and everything.

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

Afterward their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped from their souls never to meet. 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? She will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads this she will say: And Amory will have no other adventure like me.

Afterwards he remembered one reply of hers to something he had asked her. He remembered it in this form – perhaps he had unconsciously arranged and polished it.

He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

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?

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It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people- with the single mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.

Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.

The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it.

To be afraid, a person has either to be very great and strong
or else a coward. I'm neither.

Do you think I leapt at this pessimism, grasped it as sweetly smug superior thing.

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.

You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.

I want to do everything in the world with you.

Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.

We heard it from three people, so it must be true.

He held her hand and she gave him such a look that he whispered her name aloud.

I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.