F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”

“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.”

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

“Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

“Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

“I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”

“… 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”

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

“I love her and that's the beginning of everything…”

“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to makes such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person I thought it was your secret pride."

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."

She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”

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

“We haven’t met for many years, said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be.
"Five years next November."
The automatic quality set us all back at least another minute.”

“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.”

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

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. 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.”

“She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.”

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

“What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”

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

“Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?”

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

“One should… be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

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

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

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

“Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.”

“They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.”

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

“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 he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

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

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

“I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won't.”

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”

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

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

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

“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”

“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.”

“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

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

“Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”

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

“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”

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

“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

“It takes two to make an accident.”

“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”

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

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him”

“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.”

“Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”

“I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.”

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

“There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…”

“I'm a cynical idealist.”

“Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!”