Francis Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

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

I'd rather marry a man of fifty and be taken care of than marry a man of thirty and take care of him. ~ Francis Scott Fitzgerald

I'd feel I was... wastin' myself. There's two sides to me, you see. There's the sleepy old side you love; an' there's a sort of energy – the feelin' that makes me do wild things. That's the part of me that may be useful somewhere. that'll last when I'm not beautiful anymore. ~ Francis Scott Fitzgerald

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

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It was a tradition between them that they should never be too tired for anything, and they found it made the days better on the whole and put the evenings more in order. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

She was incurably dishonest. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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 ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

He found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

She had achieved the elusiveness that gives hidden significance to the least significant remarks.
"Is it like you felt toward me in Paris?"
"I feel comfortable and happy when I'm with you. In Paris it was different. But you never know how you once felt. Do you? ~ 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

The ability to hold two competing thoughts in one's mind and still be able to function is the mark of a superior mind ~ 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

He was consumed with wonder by her presence. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

His voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her, unroll an endless succession of magnificent possibilities. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

He had long been outside of the world of simple desires and their fulfillments, and he was inept and uncertain. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Men she knew'? - she had conceded vaguely to herself that all men who had ever been in love with her were her friends. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Will father be there?" she asked.

John turned to her in astonishment.

Your father is dead," he replied somberly. "Why should he go to Hades? You have it confused with another place that was abolished long ago."

After supper they folded up the table-cloth and spread their blankets for the night.

What a dream it was," Kismine sighed, gazing up at the stars. "How strange it seems to be here with one dress and a penniless fianc_!

Under the stars," she repeated. "I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth."

It was a dream," said John quietly. "Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness."

How pleasant then to be insane!"

So I'm told," said John gloomily. "I don't know any longer. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it." He shivered. "Turn up your coat collar, little girl, the night's full of chill and you'll get pneumonia. His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours."

So wrapping himself in his blanket he fell off to sleep. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I doubt if, after all, I'll ever write anything again worth putting in print. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

A pause; it endured horribly. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house ~ 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

Now his response was merely to detach himself from personal contact. Looking back, she could not remember a conversation veering on the intimate from which he had not withdrawn immediately. He had had of course, in the past, more than enough of being devoured alive by the consuming interest of his admirers. A boy called Will Scott, back in Scotland. An Archer, they said, called Robin Stewart. Jerott, perhaps, long ago. Small wonder that Francis Crawford today took routine precautions to repel invaders.

And of course, that was it. Standing there, her eyes blank in the fog, Philippa saw plainly so much which had escaped her. The dismissals she had suffered; the exchanges he had broken off; the measures he took, when he remembered, to dampen the ardour of any impressionable fool who might dream of clinging to him.

Such as herself. She remembered the ringed, picturesque hands on which she had fixed her eyes, and their abrupt withdrawal. It was not only in the eyes of the world that her pursuit of Lymond was being put down to a blossoming schoolgirl devotion. Warily, Lymond himself had considered it time to start taking precautions. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

And you say you're a weak character, that you've no will." "Not a bit of will - I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires - " "You are not!" She brought one little fist down onto the other. "You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

Then Rosalind began popping into his mind again, and he found his lips forming her name over and over. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Gatsby looked at Daisy in a way that every young girl wanted to be looked at ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?"
The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence.
"I read your letter," said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal, but with a faint two-edged deference.
"I can't get what I write on paper," broke out Boxley. "You've all been very decent, but it's a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you've teamed me with listen to what I say, but they spoil it--they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words."
"Why don't you write it yourself?" asked Stahr.
"I have. I sent you some."
"But it was just talk, back and forth," said Stahr mildly. "Interesting talk but nothing more."
Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but non to amusement, and said:
"I don't think you people read things. The men are duelling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket."
He barked again and subsided.
Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?"
"What? Naturally not."
"You'd consider it too cheap."
"Movie standards are different," said Boxley, hedging.
"Do you ever go to them?"
"No--almost never."
"Isn't it because people are always duelling and falling down wells?"
Yes--and wearing strained facial expressions and talk ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

And of course all that he is is a gifted man without a moral sense. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

At any rate, that's how I started running. Thirty three - that's how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist. ~ Haruki Murakami

To this husband of hers she made the last concession of married life, which is more complete, more irrevocable, than the first - she listened to him. She told herself that the years had brought her tolerance - actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed of moral courage. She ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Her voice sounded like money. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The things that'll make you fail I'll love always. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

But I hate to get anywhere by working for it. I'll show the marks, don't you know. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

"I was counting the waves", replied Amory gravely, "I'm going in for statistics". ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody - told it to me because "Jay Gatsby" had broken up like glass against Tom's hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

Too bad she was dull--dull girls were unbearable--certainly pretty though. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Rich people don't have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their "work" is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention. Why didn't I reread my F. Scott Fitzgerald sooner? I might have saved myself some time. ~ Sergio Troncoso

I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Vich Deelish My heart is in the heart of my son And my life is in his life surely A man can be twice young In the life of his sons only. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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