F Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alivewith chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

One girl can be pretty - but a dozen are only a chorus. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

T hey were both restless in the night. In a day or two Dick would try to banish the ghost of Rosemary before it became walled up with them, but for the moment he had no force to do it. Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Until the great mobs could be educated into a moral sense, someone must cry: Thou shalt not! ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I've got one more record. - Have you heard "So Long, Letty"? I suppose you have.'
'Honestly, you don't understand - I haven't heard a thing.'
Nor known, nor smelt, nor tasted he might have added; only hot cheeked girls in hot secret rooms. The young maidens he had known at New Haven in 1914 kissed men saying 'There!' hands at the man's chest to push him away. Now there was this scarcely saved waif of disaster bringing him the essence of a continent ... ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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 ... ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Tell me. I'll believe it. I always believe anything anyone tells about myself – don't you? ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

They were uncertain, resentful, and somewhat ill at ease. This they hid by pretending an elaborate relief at being out of the army, and by assuring each other that military discipline should never again rule their stubborn, liberty-loving wills. Yet, as a matter of fact, they would have felt more at home in a prison than in this newfound and unquestionable freedom. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Egyptian Proverb: The worst things: To be in bed and sleep not, To want for one who comes not, To try to please and please not. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale
and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one ... Vitality never "takes." You have it or you haven't it, like health or brown eyes or a baritone voice. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Weep not for me but for thy children. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

But to be included in Dick Diver's world for a while was a remarkable experience: people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years. He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world. So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all- inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

They were a party of three on horseback ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

These people could appreciate me and take me for granted, and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas the clever men I meet would just analyse me and tell me I'm this because of this or that because of that. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence 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. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering - this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o'clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn't work - and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. ~ 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

You can't repeat the past. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Don't say 'wife.' I'm your mistress. Wife's such an ugly word. Your 'permanent mistress' is so much more tangible and desirable ... . ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

One doctor in Chicago said I was bluffing, but what he really meant was that I was a twin six and he had never seen one before. ~ 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

To be of great wit and conversational powers, and simultaneously strong and serious and silent. To be generous and open and self-sacrificing, yet to be somewhat mysterious and sensitive and even a little bitter with melancholy. To be both light and dark. To harmonize this, to melt all this down into a single man - ah, there was something to be done. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre. ~ F Scott 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 decision as to when to quit, as to when one is merely floundering around and causing other people trouble, has to be made frequently in a lifetime. In youth we are taught the rather simple rule never to quit, because we are presumably following programmes made by people wiser than ourselves. My own conclusion is that when one has embarked on a course that grows increasingly doubtful and one feels the vital forces beginning to be used up, it is best to ask advice if decent advice is in range... ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around. 'They're a rotten crowd,' I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.' I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

He felt a discrepancy between the growing luxury in which the Divers lived & the need for display which apparently went along with it, ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

How different it all was from what you'd planned. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do? ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

He drew her very tenderly close and their lips met like starved hearts. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

How I feel is that if I wanted anything I'd take it. That's what I've always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven't room for any other desires. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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 saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

You should have risen above it," I said smugly. "It's not a slam at you when people are rude
it's a slam at the people they've met before. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

At first I was surprised and confused; then as he lay in his house and didn't move or breathe or speak hour upon hour it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested
interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Brought up rather than brought out. Dick ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I'm inclined to reserve all judgement, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until 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, 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

Sometimes when you're around I've been tempted to kiss you suddenly and tell you that you were just an idealistic boy with a lot of caste nonsense in his head. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows - the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

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

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all
Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I want it to smell of magnolias instead
of peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on the same gravel that Lee's
boots crunched on. 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
~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love 'Tender is the Night,' and its atmosphere of doomed romance. He was one of the greatest prose stylists, with a wonderfully clear but lyrical quality. ~ David Nicholls

He knew that to be careless in dress and manner required more confidence than to be careful. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I thought you weren't afraid." "I never am
but I won't throw my life away just to show one man I'm not. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many others. As a kid Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard. ~ Joe R. Lansdale

In the strangeness of the brightening day it seemed presumptuous that with this feeble, broken instrument of his mind he had ever tried to think. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Shakespeare
whetting, frustrating, surprising and gratifying. ~ 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

You have a place in my heart no one else ever could have. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man's duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I really like 'This Side of Paradise' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think it's a cool description of a character. ~ Bridgit Mendler

I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything ... Sophisticated - God, I'm sophisticated! (Daisy) ~ 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

She was about twenty-four, Rosemary guessed - her face could have been described in terms of conventional prettiness, but the effect was that it had been made first on the heroic scale with strong structure and marking, as if the features and vividness of brow and coloring, everything we associate with temperament and character had been molded with a Rodinesque intention, and then chiseled away in the direction of prettiness to a point where a single slip would have irreparably diminished its force and quality. With the mouth the sculptor had taken desperate chances - it was the cupid's bow of a magazine cover, yet it shared the distinction of the rest. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

But you can love more than just one person, can't you? ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald is the first of the last generation. ~ Gertrude Stein

Joel did not quite believe in picture actresses' grief. They have other preoccupations - they are beautiful rose-gold figures blown full of life by writers and directors, and after hours they sit around and talk in whispers and giggle innuendoes, and the ends of many adventures flow through them. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

They conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Charley was twenty-six, with that faint musk of weakness hanging about him that is often mistaken for the scent of evil. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It makes me sad because I've never seen such
such beautiful shirts before. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Dick was about to retort by commenting on the extraordinary suits worn by Tommy and Prince Chillicheff, suits of a cut and pattern fantastic enough to have sauntered down Beale Street on a Sunday - when ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

A good style simply doesn't form unless you absorb half a dozen top flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but, instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journaleese. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Why shouldn't he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase
'I love you ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

January, the Monday of months.... ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

But all I know – the tremendous importance of myself to me, and the necessity of acknowledging that importance to myself – these things the wise and lovely Gloria was born knowing, these things and the painful futility of trying to know anything else. ~ 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

He had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved. So it had been. So it would ever be ... ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence, but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

You used to say a man knows things and when he stops knwing things he's like anybody else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

THE VOICE: (to BEAUTY) Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror. ~ 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

There were silences as murmurous as sound. There were pauses that seemed about to shatter and were only to be snatched back to oblivion by the tightening of his arms about her and the sense that she was resting there as a caught, gossamer feather, drifted in out of the dark. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald