F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor

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.

but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.

I think that we already have a really good system in town, but I have a vision that it could be even better. My vision is that academic excellence is the area that we should pursue more, coupled with fiscal discipline.

This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.

You'll find another.' God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.

You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.

It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny.

I want to tell you about your heart— you've probably been neglecting your heart—and you don’t know.

I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

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

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.

It is difficult for young people to live things down. We will tolerate vice, grand larceny and the quieter forms of murder in our contemporaries... but our children's friends must show a blank service record.

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

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.

I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.

So they were desperately in love and being desperately in love involves a desperate existence.

You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American.

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

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.

The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want

In a few days I'll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod-always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults-rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.

She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

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

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.

I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.

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.

Courage to me means ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life-not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things...My courage is faith-faith in the eternal resilience of me-that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does, I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide

These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire—I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.

I was too absorbed to be responsive

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.

An unread book is just a block of paper.

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.

When he buys his ties he has to ask if gin will make them run.

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.

I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.

For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!

The sign of intelligence is the ability to carry opposed thoughts at the same time.

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.

The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.