F. Scott Fitzgerald: Trending quotes

“An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.”

Source: Tender is the Night & The Last Tycoon

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

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”

Variant: You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.
Source: The Great Gatsby

“Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”

Undated letter to his daughter "Scottie" (Frances Scott Fitzgerald).
Quoted, Letters
Variant: All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Variant: I don't ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.
Source: Tender Is the Night

“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.”

“What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.”

Source: This Side of Paradise

“We all have souls of different ages”

Source: This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

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

“And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”

Source: This Side of Paradise

“unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Crack-Up

Source: Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)
Context: Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

“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.”

“So we'll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.”

Variant: He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Benediction

Source: Benediction

“You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.”

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

Source: This Side of Paradise

“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.”

“Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. - The Great Gatsby.”