Fitzgerald Quotes

(It) could involve the AMA and others in an interstate conspiracy of alarming proportions ... ~ Benedict Fitzgerald

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

eating enough carbohydrate every day will allow you to train harder, better absorb the stress of your training, and perform better in important workouts than you would without adequate carbohydrate intake. ~ Matt Fitzgerald

She wished she could help David to seem more legitimate. She wished she could do something to keep everything from being so undignified. Life seemed so uselessly extravagant. ~ Zelda 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

Do you read them? Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald?"
"Only if I have to. I try to avoid old dead white men. ~ John Grisham

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

It is not by accident that the happiest people are those who make a conscious effort to live useful lives. Their happiness, of course, is not a shallow exhilaration where life is one continuos intoxicating party. Rather, their happiness is a deep sense of inner peace that comes when they believe their lives have meaning and that they are making a difference for good in the world. ~ Ernest A. Fitzgerald

Old fellows like me can't learn new tricks. ~ Francis 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

Once, in an interview with 'V' magazine, I said that I preferred Fitzgerald to Hemingway. I think that Hemingway is an amazing writer, but by being related to him, I had it in my head that I had to like him. ~ Dree Hemingway

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

I've traveled all the way around the world; I've been to over 95 countries, so I love ethnic food, different types of cuisine. ~ Larry Fitzgerald

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

The real winners are not those at the top but those who have come the farthest over the toughest roads. Your victory may never make the headlines. But you will know about it, and that's what counts. ~ Ernest A. Fitzgerald

Dear Oscar

I don't know how to say this any other way but, you see, I need to explain something. I can't stop thinking about that night when you rescued Barney with you tart – and how good and kind I realise you've always been. It wasn't until this morning when you sent me an apple tart of my own that I finally knew what it is that I have to tell you.
The timing is pretty terrible, but, you see, the reason I haven't wanted to go away is because I've wanted to stay here, and the reason I've wanted to stay here is because of you.
I've nothing against New Zealand or anything but because of how I feel, specifically about you, the whole world looks different.
I don't know whether it's because of everything has got darker or lighter. I guess that depends on how you feel about me which is, I hope, the same.
So anyways, look, you've convinced me that I should, as you say 'embrace the adventure' so that is what I have decided to do. It was the taste of you apple tart that finally made up my mind to give this my all. But I need to know you'll be here when I come back.
I love you Oscar Dunleavy.
I've been falling in love with you since that day we first met.
I need to have some idea about whether you feel the same way about me. Send me a sign.
Anything will do.
Love,
Meg ~ Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

Coming through the years, and finding that I not only have just the fans of my day, but the young ones of today - that's what it means, it means it was worth all of it. ~ Ella 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

I'd try to stuff myself into one of these scenarios, but it's like wearing a size five sneaker when your foot is a seven
you can get by for a few steps, and then you sit down and pull off the shoe because it just plain hurts too much. ~ Jodi Picoult

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

You never stop thinking about technique, but really, the reason we're actors is because of the sheer joy of those few moments you get every now and again where you're totally present. The rest is just struggle and misery. ~ Caitlin 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

When we were at the Apollo, Holiday was a block away. I asked her for her autograph. ~ Ella Fitzgerald

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it. ~ Robert 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

She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

I'm the go-to guy for Mexican priests. I'm the new Barry Fitzgerald, except with a Mexican accent. ~ Cheech Marin

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

He said, aloud, 'The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the kingdom of light. How different they will appear when this darkness is gone and the shadow-body has passed away. The universe, after all, is within us. The way leads inward, always inwards. ~ Penelope 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

I was fortunate to have a grandfather who was an optometrist. Vision therapy was something that we routinely did to strengthen our eyes and give us better focus. I was fortunate that he could teach me techniques that are still paying dividends for me to this day. ~ Larry 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

She quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that's one of the reasons why they did. ~ Zelda 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

A feeling of slow motion came upon me then, and parts of my bike scratched against bits of my body. Slimy seaweed tangled around my ankles and my shoes slipped off my feet. My arms and legs were dragged in different directions as if there was an underwater force making me dance to a morbid tune.

I felt light. I felt slow. I felt fast - all in quick succession, but I couldn't think of anything except the quite relaxing idea that soon everything was going to be over.

I was alone. All around the wet rocks were silent and slimy. I couldn't feel any pleasure or any purpose. My decision seemed to make a terrible kind of sense My panic had gone. I was finished making decisions. I didn't think I'd ever have any more to make.

I'm not exactly sure what I'd been hoping for next. Brightness and song possibly. Beautiful music perhaps, say a harp or something playing in the distance and warmth to soothe my numb, frozen, sopping, scraped body. I definitely wasn't expecting what happened next. ~ Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

I didn't die. I never died. I'm not dead. OK, I feel pretty rotten about the whole situation- the way I disappeared that night without saying where I eas going and how everyone assumed I really was dead, and the way I let them believe it.
Things had gotten on top of me. It was because of this whole sequence of events that made me want to cycle down to the shore and tumble into the black sea. ~ Sarah Moore 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

I'm kind of a control freak. I like to be really prepared. ~ Caitlin 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

I enjoy working with the American Cancer Society because I fully support its mission of saving lives and creating a world with less cancer and more birthdays for everyone. ~ Larry 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

Nothing could have survived our life. ~ Zelda 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

I came from a family where my people didn't like rhythm and blues. Bing Crosby - "Pennies from Heaven" - Ella Fitzgerald, was all I heard. ~ Little Richard

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

Don't worry," she says. "Ernest always attracted obsessives. You were only one of many. And secretly, sometimes, I think he was flattered. Nobody ever stalked Fitzgerald. ~ Naomi Wood

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