F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their (W/E Egg) dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

All that kept her from breaking was that it was not an image of strength that was leaving her; she would be just as strong without him.

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

You have a place in my heart no one else ever could have.

At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon.

We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical ill-considered criticism.

Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.

Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure.

I don't care about truth. I want some happiness.

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

I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.

A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty.

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

It's a mining town in lotus land.

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

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.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

The rich get richer and the poor get - children.

Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.

Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.

When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he pondered o'er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death: "Thru Time I'll save my love!" he said. . . yet Beauty vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead. . . -Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair: "Who'd learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet there". . . So all my words, however true, might sing you to a thousandth June, and no one ever know that you were Beauty for an afternoon.

The greatest profound pain is cased by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams.

That was always my experience-a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton .... However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

I'm restless. My whole generation is restless. I'm sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer. Even if I had no talents I'd not be content to work ten years, condemned either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give some man's son an automobile.

He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.

Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night

Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.

It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.

Happiness is the relief after extreme tension

For what it’s worth, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be.

Who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the darkness?

I was in love with a whirlwind, so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.

The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaiety, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him. [- Nick Carroway]

I can’t tell you just how wonderful she is. I don’t want you to know. I don’t want any one to know.

Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.

It was a grey day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn.