“New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.”
Source: Tender is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald:
411
quotes
47
likes
F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
Quoted, Short Stories
Source: The Freshest Boy
"The Lees of Happiness"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together.
“He knew now that he had always been a fool.”
"O Russet Witch!"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o'clock. When he was in his room and had closed the door tight he stood by it for a moment, his thin limbs trembling. He knew now that he had always been a fool.
"O Russet Witch!"
But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.
“His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.”
Quoted, Short Stories
Source: A Diamond As Big as The Ritz
"May Day"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: Mr. In and Mr. Out are not listed by the census-taker. You will search for them in vain through the social register or the births, marriages, and deaths, or the grocer's credit list. Oblivion has swallowed them and the testimony that they ever existed at all is vague and shadowy, and inadmissible in a court of law. Yet I have it upon the best authority that for a brief space Mr. In and Mr. Out lived, breathed, answered to their names and radiated vivid personalities of their own.
During the brief span of their lives they walked in their native garments down the great highway of a great nation; were laughed at, sworn at, chased, and fled from. Then they passed and were heard of no more.
"The Diamond As Big As The Ritz"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: It was an amazing predicament. He was, in one sense, the richest man that ever lived — and yet was he worth anything at all? If his secret should transpire there was no telling to what measures the Government might resort in order to prevent a panic, in gold as well as in jewels. They might take over the claim immediately and institute a monopoly.
"O Russet Witch!"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o'clock. When he was in his room and had closed the door tight he stood by it for a moment, his thin limbs trembling. He knew now that he had always been a fool.
"O Russet Witch!"
But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.
"The Jelly-Bean"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: The street was hot at three and hotter still at four, the April dust seeming to enmesh the sun and give it forth again as a world-old joke forever played on an eternity of afternoons. But at half past four a first layer of quiet fell and the shades lengthened under the awnings and heavy foliaged trees. In this heat nothing mattered. All life was weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman's hand on a tired forehead.
Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)
Context: I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation — with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.
“My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.”
"The Diamond As Big As The Ritz"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: "The Schnlitzer-Murphys had diamonds as big as walnuts — "
"That's nothing." Percy had leaned forward and dropped his voice to a low whisper. "That's nothing at all. My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel."
Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: "You're simply stubborn. You think you don't want to be like any one else. You always have been that way, and you always will be. But just think how it would be if every one else looked at things as you do — what would the world be like?"
As this was an inane and unanswerable argument Benjamin made no reply, and from that time on a chasm began to widen between them. He wondered what possible fascination she had ever exercised over him.
"O Russet Witch!"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less, when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation, our friends to a few to whom we are anaesthetic; ending up at last in a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.
Bk. 2, Ch. 11
Quoted, Tender is the Night (1934)
Context: 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. There open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
“You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”
Source: Tender Is the Night
“She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.”
Source: The Beautiful And Damned
“I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.”
Source: Flappers and Philosophers
“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”
Quoted, Tender is the Night (1934)
“I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”
Source: The Beautiful and Damned
“Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.”
Source: Tender Is the Night
“Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”
Source: The Great Gatsby
“It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.”
Source: The Beautiful and Damned
Source: The Beautiful and Damned
Source: Tender Is the Night
“All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase— 'I love you.”
Quoted, Short Stories
Source: The Offshore Pirate
“If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired”
Source: The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Source: Tender is the Night & The Last Tycoon
“I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”
Variant: You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.
Source: The Great Gatsby
