F Scott Fitzgerald Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by F Scott Fitzgerald.
Famous Quotes By F Scott Fitzgerald
You know, you're a little complicated after all."
"Oh no," she assured him hastily. "No, I'm not really - I'm just a - I'm just a whole lot of different simple people. — F Scott Fitzgerald
I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition ... . — F Scott Fitzgerald
But there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. — F Scott Fitzgerald
She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible. — F Scott Fitzgerald
He wanted people to like his mind again-after awhile it might be such a nice place in which to live. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Standing in the station, with Paris in back of them, it seemed as if they were vicariously leaning a little over the ocean, already undergoing a sea-change, a shifting about of atoms to form the essential molecule of new people. — F Scott Fitzgerald
I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't repeat the past."
"Can't repeat the past? he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can! — F Scott Fitzgerald
Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.
Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen. — F Scott Fitzgerald
As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her, — F Scott Fitzgerald
No more to wait the twilight of the moon in this sequestered vale of star and spire, for one eternal morning of desire passes to time and earthy afternoon. — 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
We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner. — F Scott Fitzgerald
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! — F Scott Fitzgerald
Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing them: "Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free. — F Scott Fitzgerald
The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the last edge of twilight. The early moon had drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Your photograph is all I have: it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night. — F Scott Fitzgerald
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall ... — F Scott Fitzgerald
He saw Kathleen sitting in the middle of a long white table alone.Immediately things changed. As he walked toward her the people shrank back against the walls till they were only murals; the white table lengthened and became an altar where the priestess sat alone. Vitality welled up in him and he could have stood a long time across the table from her, looking and smiling. — F Scott Fitzgerald
In fact to write (This Side of Paradise) took three months; to conceive it
three minutes; to collect the data in it
all my life. — F Scott Fitzgerald
The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic. — F Scott Fitzgerald
My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis
a moulding of the confusion of life into form. — F Scott Fitzgerald
You've a place in my heart no one else ever could have, but tied down here I'd get restless. 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 any more." She — F Scott Fitzgerald
A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Every act of life, from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner, became an effort. I hated the night when I couldn't sleep and I hated the day because it went toward night. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Frequently I had feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering in the horizon. — 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
She was a brave, hopeful woman and she was following her husband somewhere, changing herself to this kind of person or that, without being able to lead him a step out of his path, and sometimes realizing with discouragement how deep in him the guarded secret of her direction lay. And yet an air of luck clung about her, as if she were a token... — F Scott Fitzgerald
The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time-time, that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights. — 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
Limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously — F Scott Fitzgerald
He had been living in a down-town Y.M.C.A., but when he quit the task of making sow-ear purses out of sows' ears, he moved up-town and went to work immediately as a reporter for The Sun. He kept at this for a year, doing desultory writing on the side, with little success, and then one day an infelicitous incident peremptorily closed his newspaper career. On a February afternoon he was assigned to report a parade of Squadron A. Snow threatening, he went to sleep instead before a hot fire, and when he woke up did a smooth column about the muffled beats of the horses' hoofs in the snow ... This he handed in. Next morning a marked copy of the paper was sent down to the City Editor with a scrawled note: "Fire the man who wrote this." It seemed that Squadron A had also seen the snow threatening - had postponed the parade until another day. A week later he had begun "The Demon Lover." ... In — F Scott Fitzgerald
Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains ... — 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
She saw him the first day on board, and then her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him. — F Scott Fitzgerald
It is the custom to look back on ourselves of the boom days with a disapproval that approaches horror ... But it had its virtues, that old boom: Life was a great deal larger and gayer for most people, and the stampede to the Spartan virtues in times of war and famine shouldn't make us too dizzy to remember its hilarious glory. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Biography is the falsest of the arts. — F Scott Fitzgerald
They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two. — F Scott Fitzgerald
I have never wished there was a God to call on- I have often wished there was a God to thank. — F Scott Fitzgerald
It was all very purposeful and sad when Anthony told Gloria one night that he wanted, above all things, to be killed. But, as always, they were sorry for each other for the wrong things at the wrong time ... — F Scott Fitzgerald
Mountain-climbing cars are built on a slant similar to the angle of a hat-brim of a man who doesn't want to be recognized. — F Scott Fitzgerald
At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Epigram, than which, if one is content with ostensible — F Scott Fitzgerald
The attitude of the city on his action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city, but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial. He was completely indifferent to popular opinion. — F Scott Fitzgerald
A writer wastes nothing. — F Scott Fitzgerald
We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth ... It has no day. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane ... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Going to work so as to forget that there was nothing worth working for — 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
hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort — F Scott Fitzgerald
At both ends of life man needed nourishment: a breast - a shrine. Something to lay himself beside when no one wanted him further, and shoot a bullet into his head. — F Scott Fitzgerald
The instant her voice broke off ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. — F Scott Fitzgerald
That's going to be your trouble - judgment about yourself.
(Tender is the Night) — F Scott Fitzgerald
She was one of those people who are famous beyond their actual achievement. — F Scott Fitzgerald
That illusion of young romantic love to which women look forever forward and forever back. — 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
You remind me of a smoked cigarette. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Once we were one person, and always it will be a little that way. — F Scott Fitzgerald
There!" she said, as she spread the tablecloth and put the sandwiches in a neat pile upon it. "Don't they look tempting? I always think that food tastes better outdoors."
With that remark," remarked Kismine, "Jasmine enters the Middle class. — F Scott Fitzgerald
You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming. — F Scott Fitzgerald
You have a place in my heart no one else ever could have. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Such a kiss--it was a flower held against the face, never to be described, scarcely to be remembered; as though her beauty were giving off emanations of itself which settled transiently and already dissolving upon his heart. — 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
If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again. — 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
My head aches so, so excuse this walking there like an ordinary with a white cat will explain, I think. I can speak three languages, four with English, and am sure I could be useful interpreting if you arrange such thing in France I'm sure I could control everything with the belts all bound around everybody like it was Wednesday. It — F Scott Fitzgerald
that voice was a deathless song. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power-at its worst the Napoleonic delusion. — F Scott Fitzgerald
At first there would be an American cast to the congress, almost Rotarian in its forms and ceremonies, then the closer-knit European vitality would fight through, and finally the Americans would play their trump card, the announcement of colossal gifts and endowments, of great new plants and training schools, and in the presence of the figures the Europeans would blanch and walk timidly. — F Scott Fitzgerald
He stretched out his arms towards the dark water in a curious way, and,far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling involuntarily I glanced seaward - and distinguishing nothing except a single green light, minute and faraway, that might have been the end of a dock. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Why? But I want to know just why it's impossible for an American to be gracefully idle" - his words gathered conviction - "it astonishes me. It - it - I don't understand why people think that every young man ought to go down-town and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of his life at dull, unimaginative work, certainly not altruistic work. — F Scott Fitzgerald
You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads. — F Scott Fitzgerald
She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Jelly-bean is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular- - I am idling, I have idled, I will idle — F Scott Fitzgerald
some of the boys she went with in Baltimore were "terrible speeds" and came to dances in states of artificial stimulation; — F Scott Fitzgerald
So many, such mingled emotions, that no one of them was separable from the others! She could have wept for her mother, who was crying quietly back there ten feet and for the loveliness of the June sunlight flooding in at the windows. She was beyond all conscious perceptions. Only a sense, colored with delirious wild excitement, that the ultimately important was happening - and a trust, fierce and passionate, burning in her like a prayer, that in a moment she would be forever and securely safe. — F Scott Fitzgerald
I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.
My business is to tear them apart. — F Scott Fitzgerald
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. — F Scott Fitzgerald
The cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice-box with the left overs. — F Scott Fitzgerald
The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised. — F Scott Fitzgerald
A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber holiday. As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry. — F Scott Fitzgerald
There was never any doubt at whom he was looking or talking - and this is a flattering attention, for who looks at us? — F Scott Fitzgerald
You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Her life was the significant pause between two glances in a mirror." ( paraphrased from The Beautiful and Damned") — F Scott Fitzgerald
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction. — F Scott Fitzgerald
He used to think that he wanted to be goos, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in. — F Scott Fitzgerald
That's my theory: immediate electrocution of all ignorant and dirty people. I'm all for the criminals - give color to life. Trouble is if you started to punish ignorance you'd have to begin in the first families, then you could take up the moving-picture people, and finally Congress and the clergy. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Dick tried to plunge over the Alpine crevasse between the sexes. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Beautiful things only grow to a certain height, and then they fail and fade off. — F Scott Fitzgerald
You'd think you'd been singled out of all the women in the world for this crowning indignity." "What if I do!" she cried angrily. "It isn't an indignity for them. It's their one excuse for living. It's the one thing they're good for. It is an indignity for me. — F Scott Fitzgerald