F Scoot Fitzgerald Quotes

I didn't know till 15 that there was anyone in the world but me,and it cost me plenty. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

A lot of young girls together is a romantic secret thing like the first sight of wild ducks at dawn. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Laughter is easier, minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It's your turn to be the centre, to give others what was given to you for so long. You've got to give security to young people and peace to your husband, and a sort of charity to the old. You've got to let the people who work for you depend on you. You've got to cover up a few more troubles than you show, and be a little more patient than the average person, and do a little more instead of a little less than your share. The light and glitter of the world is in your hands. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

For those minutes courage flowed like wine out of the November dusk, and he was the eternal hero, one with the sea-rover on the prow of a Norse galley, one with Roland and Horatius, Sir Nigel and Ted Coy, scraped and stripped into trim and then flung by his own will into the breach, beating back the tide, hearing from afar the thunder of cheers . . . finally bruised and weary, but still elusive, circling an end, twisting, changing pace, straight-arming . . . falling behind the Groton goal with two men on his legs, in the only touchdown of the game. THE ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Rich girls don't marry poor boys, Jay Gatsby ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

this midnight my desire will see, shadowed among the embers, furled in flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Like most girls she had been brought up on the warm milk prepared by Annie Fellows Johnston and on novels in which the female was beloved because of certain mysterious womanly qualities, always mentioned but never displayed. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Was it for this the wild geese spread The gray wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this. Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave. ~ William Butler Yeats

I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

So this is the boom, eh?" I said. "Not exactly Scott Fitzgerald, is it?" "I'll tell you what it's like," he said glumly. "It's like being in Caligula's Rome, and everyone around you's having an orgy, and you're the mug stuck looking after the horse." He pulled heavily on his cigarette. "The whole thing'll come crashing down," he said bleakly, "and all anyone'll have done is eaten a lot of expensive cheese. ~ Paul Murray

Darling
I love these velvet nights. I've never been able to decide whether the night was a bitter enemie or a "grand patron"
or whether I love you most in the eternal classic half-lights where it blends with day or in the full religious fan-fare of mid-night or perhaps in the lux of noon. Anyway, I love you most and you 'phoned me just because you phoned me tonight
I walked on those telephone wires for two hours after holding your love like a parasol to balance me. My dear
~ Zelda Fitzgerald

She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The sea, he thought, had treasured its memories deeper than the faithless land. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

He felt that to succeed here the idea of success must grasp and limit his mind. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Lots of talk lately about the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL that seems to be exclusively masculine. And how many of the characters in the GENIUS BOOKS are likable? Is Holden Caulfield likable? Is Meursault in The Stranger? Is Henry Miller? Is any character in any of these system novels particularly likable? Aren't they usually loathsome but human, etc., loathsome and neurotic and obsessed? In my memory, all the characters in Jonathan Franzen are total douchebags (I know, I know, I'm not supposed to use that, feminine imagery, whatever, but it is SO satisfying to say and think). How about female characters in the genius books? Was Madame Bovary likable? Was Anna Karenina? Is Daisy Buchanan likable? Is Daisy Miller? Is it the specific way in which supposed readers HATE unlikable female characters (who are too depressed, too crazy, too vain, too self-involved, too bored, too boring), that mirrors the specific way in which people HATE unlikable girls and women for the same qualities? We do not allow, really, the notion of the antiheroine, as penned by women, because we confuse the autobiographical, and we pass judgment on the female author for her terrible self-involved and indulgent life. We do not hate Scott Fitzgerald in "The Crack-Up" or Georges Bataille in Guilty for being drunken and totally wading in their own pathos, but Jean Rhys is too much of a victim. ~ Kate Zambreno

Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names - Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

He hurried the phrase 'educated at Oxord,' or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Nonfiction is a form of literature that lies halfway between fiction and fact. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Life is like a giant hors d'oeuvre tray in that it is to be savored. ~ Jack Fitzgerald

Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy or Gatsby anymore, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal skepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Scott is gone.
I've had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we're acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I'd collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. "Gone?" I would whisper, to no-one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed - but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward. ~ Therese Anne Fowler

New friends can often have a better time together than old friends. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

always puts me in mind of that F. Scott Fitzgerald line: Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. The ~ Blake Crouch

Dick tried to plunge over the Alpine crevasse between the sexes. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

There are four types of husbands.
The husband who always wants to stay in in the evening, has no vices and works for a salary. Totally undesirable!
The atavistic master whose mistress one is, to wait on his pleasure. This sort always considers every pretty woman "shallow," a sort of peacock with arrested development.
Next comes the worshiper, the idolaters of his wife and all that is his, to the utter oblivion of everything else. This sort demands an emotional actress for a wife. God! It must be an exertion to be thought righteous!
And Anthony - a temporarily passionate lover with wisdom enough to realize when it has flown and that it must fly. And I want to get married to Anthony. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

You see, when you were little they kept sending me snap–shots of you, first as a baby and then as a child in socks playing on the beach with a pail and shovel, and then suddenly as a wistful little girl with wondering, pure eyes - and I used to build dreams about you. A man has to have something living to cling to. I think, Lois, it was your little white soul I tried to keep near me - even when life was at its loudest and every intellectual idea of God seemed the sheerest mockery, and desire and love and a million things came up to me and said: 'Look here at me! See, I'm Life. You're turning your back on it!' All the way through that shadow, Lois, I could always see your baby soul flitting on ahead of me, very frail and clear and wonderful. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Again the word was a prayer, incense offered up to a high God through this new and unfathomable darkness ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption - and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

... I used to build dreams about you. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Where visual artists are concerned, the Baroque sculptor and architect Bernini and the painter and sculptor Picasso were clearly adept at both experiential and instrumental attending, says Tellegen, as is the modern architect Frank Gehry. Choosing a literary example, he says that F. Scott Fitzgerald once admitted to "wrapping one of his romantic flings in cellophane" for later artistic use and notes that "this kind of heartless but honest professionalism is not uncommon among creative people. ~ Winifred Gallagher

Writing is eternal, For therein the dead heart liveth, the clay-cold tongue is eloquent, And the quick eye of the reader is cleared by the reed of the scribe. As a fossil in the rock, or a coin in the mortar of a ruin, So the symbolled thoughts tell of a departed soul: The plastic hand hath its witness in a statue, and exactitude of vision in a picture, And so, the mind, that was among us, in its writings is embalmed. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

T.V.'s weird because it's both the greatest gig as an actor potentially because it can be all this work for all this time, but there are so many question marks at every stage of the process. ~ Caitlin Fitzgerald

Into a dozen minds entered a quick suspicion, a rumour of scandal. Could it be that behind the scenes with this couple, apparently so in love, lurked some curious antipathy? Why else this streak of fire across such a cloudless heaven? ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

He did not understand all he had heard, but from his clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The greatest profound pain is cased by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts. But, with a mistaken faith in intelligence, I plodded on. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

We have great faith, though yours at present is uncrystallized; we have a terrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy and, above all, a childlike simplicity that keeps us from ever being really malicious. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better if they're about people the writer doesn't like very much. ~ Penelope Fitzgerald

Saying good-by, Dick was aware of Elsie Speers' full charm, aware that she meant rather more to him than merely a last unwilingly relinquished fragment of Rosemary. He could possibly have made up Rosemary - he could never have made up her mother. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish ideas in her head and doesn't know what she's doing. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald