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F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
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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
F. Scott Fitzgerald: 411 quotes49 likes

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

“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.”

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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“We all have souls of different ages”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

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

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: Quoted, The Great Gatsby (1925), ch. 7

“In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Variant: Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
Source: Tender Is the Night

“Look at that,' she whispered, and then after a moment: 'I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The Diamond As Big As The Ritz"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

“in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“People living alone get used to loneliness.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“Love is fragile -- she was thinking -- but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love-words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book May Day

Source: May Day

“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“Someday I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Source: Tender is the Night

“Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I can’t tell you just how wonderful she is. I don’t want you to know. I don’t want any one to know.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply - I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: Quoted, The Great Gatsby (1925), ch. 3

“The rich get richer and the poor get - children.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth…”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“All I think of ever is that I love you.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I want to be a society vampire, you see.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald