F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe - and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me.

Baseball is a game played by idiots for morons.

Men don’t often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.

Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

I've given parties that have made Indian rajahs green with envy. I've had prima donnas break $10,000 engagements to come to my smallest dinners. When you were still playing button back in Ohio, I entertained on a cruising trip that was so much fun that I had to sink my yacht to make my guests go home.

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

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.

The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire's bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle.

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others -- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner -- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

They always believe that 'things are in a bad way now,' but they 'haven't any faith in these idealists.' One minute they call Wilson 'just a dreamer, not practical'- a year later they rail at him for making his dreams realities. They haven't clear logical ideas on one single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all change. They don't think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won't see that if they don't pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we're going round and round in a circle. That- is the great middle class.

I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.

Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.

I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them-with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances, which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.

Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.' He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly.

My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.

The two basic stories of all times are Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer-the charm of women and the courage of men.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

I love this simply because it's cute, and I guess it's a sign of the times in many respect. It's pretty much saying you complete me, only in the sweetest way possible.

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon,' cried Daisy, 'and the day after that, and the next thirty years?' 'Don't be morbid,' Jordan said. 'Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.' 'But it's so hot,' insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, 'And everything's so confused. Let's all go to town!

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea--if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.

Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.

No one should live beyond 30.

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

One hurries through, even though there's time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.

She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.

There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.

She was incurably dishonest.

The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.