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F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald , known professionally as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist and short story writer, whose works illustrate the Jazz Age. While he achieved limited success in his lifetime, he is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also authored 4 collections of short stories, as well as 164 short stories in magazines during his lifetime.

✵ 24. September 1896 – 21. December 1940  •  Other names Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

Works

The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald: 411 quotes49 likes

Famous F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Crack-Up

Notebook E: Epigrams, Wisecracks, and Jokes https://books.google.com/books?id=NIhKY8SpAE4C&amp;q=%22You%20don%27t%20write%20because%20you%20want%20to%20say%20something%3B%20you%20write%20because%20you%27ve%20got%20something%20to%20say.%22&amp;pg=PA123#v=onepage, edited by Edmund Wilson (1945) <br class="br">Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, The Great Gatsby (1925)

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notebook E (1945) edited by Edmund Wilson
Quoted, Notebooks

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby (1925), ch. 9

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes about life

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes about love

“… 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”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Source: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: “I love her and that's the beginning of everything…”

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Variant: I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.
Source: Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Trending quotes

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

“There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Variant: 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.

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“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?”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Love of the Last Tycoon

Source: The Last Tycoon

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Closing lines
Source: Quoted, The Great Gatsby (1925)

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Source: The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Variant: They're a rotten lot," I shouted, across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.
Source: The Great Gatsby

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Variant: First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“It takes two to make an accident.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Love of the Last Tycoon

Source: The Love of the Last Tycoon

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“I'm a cynical idealist.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“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!”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

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