F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

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.

Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!

If you're in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.

...for a moment people set down their glasses in county clubs and speak-easies and thought of their old best dreams.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.

It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.

I'm merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence.

mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and--and in love before they're born.

We all have souls of different ages

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

...their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.

Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work-- the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside-- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within-that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.

He's sensitive and I don't want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn't care about him.

I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.

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

The bottle of whiskey - the second one - was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who 'felt just as good on nothing at all.

I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

I found something! Courage--just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always.

Rosemary bubbled with delight at the trunks. Her naivete responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world's bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at.

People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man's duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... And one fine morning ---

Life was a damned muddle - a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of - everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side.

A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths.

Let's borrow life preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.

I hate dainty minds,' answered Marjorie. 'But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it.

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. 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.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handle with gloves.

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.

Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.

So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing.

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.

She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper.

They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.

Ernest [Hemmingway] was always ready to lend a helping hand to the one on the rung above him.

I don't like girls in the daytime,' he said shortly, and then thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: 'But I like you.' He cleared his throat. 'I like you first and second and third.

The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?