Fitzgerald Scott Quotes & Sayings

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

The notion originated with Daisy's suggestion that we hire five bath-rooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as "a place to have a mint julep." Each of us said over and over that it was a "crazy idea." - we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny ... — F Scott Fitzgerald

That's my Middle West-not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. — 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

The present was the thing
work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life — F Scott Fitzgerald

And she wanted for a moment to hold and devour him, wanted his mouth, his ears, his coat collar, wanted to surround him and engulf him ... — 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

I learned a little of beauty
enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth ... — F Scott Fitzgerald

If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones. — F Scott Fitzgerald

This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the 'creative temperament' - it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No - Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what — F Scott Fitzgerald

You will admit that if it was not life it was magnificent. — F Scott Fitzgerald

It's not a bad time, it's not one of the worst times of the day. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I can't exactly describe how I feel but it's not quite right. And it leaves me cold. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. — F Scott Fitzgerald

MR. ICKY: Is your mind in good shape? DIVINE: (Gloomily) Fair. After all what is brilliance? Merely the tact to sow when no one is looking and reap when every one is. — F Scott Fitzgerald

You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans. — F Scott Fitzgerald

But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally. — F Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

You're not in love with me. You never wanted to marry me, did you?' 'It was the twilight,' he said wonderingly. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Her voice sounded like money. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handle with gloves. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I've told you many times that the first thing I decide is the kind of story I want. ( ... ) This is not the kind of story I want. The story we bought had shine and glow - it was a happy story. This is all full of doubt and hesitation. The hero and heroine stop loving each other over trifles - then they start up again over trifles. After the first sequence you don't care if she never sees him again or he her. — 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

With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks, you've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books. — Bob Dylan

His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion. — F Scott Fitzgerald

And he suddenly realized the meaning of the word 'dissipate'
to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion. — F Scott Fitzgerald

WELL, YOU NEVER KNOW EXACTLY HOW MUCH SPACE YOU OCCUPIED IN PEOPLE'S LIVES. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style ... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over. — F Scott Fitzgerald

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window. — 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

One emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Marriage is an error of youth — F Scott Fitzgerald

She would never blame him for being the ineffectual idler so long as he did it sincerely, from the attitude that nothing much was worth doing — F Scott Fitzgerald

There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. — F Scott Fitzgerald

When I'm with you, I don't breathe quite right. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad! — F Scott Fitzgerald

Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Possibly it had occurred to him the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. [ ... ] It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one. — F Scott Fitzgerald

A man's social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I don't care about truth. I want some happiness. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete. — F Scott Fitzgerald

If you want to be prominent, get out and try for something. — F Scott Fitzgerald

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

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you — F Scott Fitzgerald

A fellow has to believe in something, Jay-such as the rottenness of humanity. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as cruelty. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Don't you know you can't do anything about people? — F Scott Fitzgerald

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation. — F Scott Fitzgerald

In the square, as they came out, a suspended mass of gasoline exhaust cooked slowly in the July sun. It was a terrible thing - unlike pure heat it held no promise of rural escape by suggested only roads choked with the same four asthma. — F Scott Fitzgerald

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about ... like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. — F Scott Fitzgerald

My yacht. I don't mind going for a coupla hours' cruise. I'll even lend you that book so you'll have something to read on the revenue — F Scott Fitzgerald

Smart men play close to the line because they have to
some of them can't stand it, so they quit. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than — F Scott Fitzgerald

One thin's sure and nothing's surer
The rich get richer and the poor get - children.
In the meantime,
In between time ... — F Scott Fitzgerald

He was good looking, "sort of distinguished when he wants to be", had a line, and was properly inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environment led her to desire — F Scott Fitzgerald

Another sigh came from the window
quite a resigned sigh. 'She's life and hope and happiness, my whole world now.' He felt the quiver of a tear on his eyelid. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I just couldn't make the grade as a hack-that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence. — 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

When a girl feels that she's perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That's charm — F Scott Fitzgerald

Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than ever on to his Celtic mother. He had tutored occasionally - the idea being that he was to "keep up," at each place "taking up the work where he left off," yet as no tutor ever found the place he left off, his mind was still in very good shape. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Look at that,' she whispered, and then after a moment: 'I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around. — F Scott Fitzgerald

That's going to be your trouble - judgment about yourself.
(Tender is the Night) — 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

Gloria was sure she wanted but to read and dream and be fed tomato sandwiches and lemonades by some angelic servant — F Scott Fitzgerald

It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people- with the single mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe. — F Scott Fitzgerald

In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year ... Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Collis, unaware that he was without a wedding garment, heralded his arrival with: I reckon I'm late
the beyed has flown. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person. — 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

The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the treas and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. — F Scott Fitzgerald

When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. — F Scott Fitzgerald

All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory's love waned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms, nor were they stretched to meet her as in the week before. For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as 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. The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between ... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homewards and let new lights come in with the sun. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Later in the garden she was happy; she did not want anything to happen, but only for the situation to remain in suspension as the two men tossed her from one mind to another; she had not existed for a long time, even as a ball. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material. — F Scott Fitzgerald

She wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson ... " "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway - a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe - all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it. — Truman Capote

I was too absorbed to be responsive — 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

I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness. Indeed, I accomplished the not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it presented itself to me in life - and of being beaten and bewildered just the same. — F Scott Fitzgerald

And floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Dresses well. Pretends that dress is superficial - but knows that it isn't. 3. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Don't forget who you are and where you come from. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you! — F Scott Fitzgerald

If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don't like this kiss-and-forget.'
'But I don't want to argue. I think it's wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can't it'll be time to argue. — F Scott Fitzgerald

A rigour passed over him,
blood rose into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a steady thumping in his ears. It was first love. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The college dreamed on
awake. He felt a nervous excitement that might have been the very throb of its slow heart. It was a stream where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be vanishing almost as it left his hand. As yet he had nothing, he had taken nothing. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The tears coursed down her cheeks - not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair and went off into a deep vinous sleep. — F Scott Fitzgerald

He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened slightly with the ghost of a superior 'Hm!'. — F Scott Fitzgerald

We'll all be failures?"
"Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of - of ineffectual and sad, and - oh, how can I tell you? — F Scott Fitzgerald

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Trouble is when you're sober you don't want to see anybody, and when you're tight nobody wants to see you. — 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