F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

Her voice is full of money.

How different it all was from what you'd planned.

I'm one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into men on such nights as these. I have the social courage to go on the stage, but not the energy; I haven't the patience to write books; and I never met a man I'd marry. However, I'm only eighteen.

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

we both fitted. If our corners were not rubbed off they were at least pulled in. But deep in us both was something that made us require more for happiness. I didn't know what I wanted

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--

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven.

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

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.

Optimism is the content of small men in high places.

That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

A writer wastes nothing.

he could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and contour.

She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself

She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter - like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination, Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it, and everything all at once seemed gorgeous.

the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.

I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway

Conditions in the [movie] industry somehow propose the paradox: "We brought you here for your individuality but while you're here we insist that you do everything to conceal it.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.

Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on.

I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to 'succeed'-and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills-domestic, professional and personal-then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.

Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.

Have a drink Tom and then you won't feel so foolish to yourself.

Learn young about hard work and manners - and you'll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.

Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

I used to build dreams about you.

Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby [is] my imaginary eldest brother.

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

I might have enjoyed the company of a woman or two... Or three but that had never stopped me from loving you.

Her fine high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet and shining, the colour of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood -- she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.

If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.

I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.

He had no plans, no definite intentions, except to kiss her lips again, to hold her in his arms.

he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.