F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes page 4

“It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”

Source: This Side of Paradise

“Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor”

“The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Human sympathy has its limits.”

Source: This Side of Paradise

“How I feel is that if I wanted anything I'd take it. That's what I've always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven't room for any other desires.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.”

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before.”

Source: Tender Is the Night

“A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.

My business is to tear them apart.”

Source: This Side of Paradise

“I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.”

Source: Tender Is the Night

“I want leisure to read—an immense amount.”

Source: This Side of Paradise

“She was beautiful - but especially she was without mercy.”

Source: The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this - so accidental - just when everything was going well.”

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.”

Source: Tender Is the Night

“It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.”

Source: Tender Is the Night

“The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden.”

“The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over.”

“Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”

“Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.”

“You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.”

Source: Tender Is the Night

“All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream”

“Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.”

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.”

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you find you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.”

Source: This Side of Paradise

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.”

“Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”

Source: Tender Is the Night

“But I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.”

Source: Tender Is the Night

“I hate dainty minds,' answered Marjorie. 'But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Flappers and Philosophers

Source: Flappers and Philosophers

“Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.”

“I've got an adjective that just fits you.”

Variant: Sometimes I don't know whether Zelda and I are real or just characters in one of my novels.

“So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.”

“Clark," she said softly, "I wouldn't change you for the world.
You're sweet the way you are. The things that'll make you fail
I'll love always-- the living in the past, the lazy days and
nights you have, and all your carelessness and generosity.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Ice Palace

Source: The Ice Palace

“the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”

“Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”

Source: Tender Is the Night

“Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.”

Source: Tender Is the Night

“Men don’t often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Love of the Last Tycoon

Source: The Last Tycoon

“There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.”

“We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.”

Source: Tender Is the Night

“Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.'
'How pleasant then to be insane!”

“I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway”

Variant: Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
Source: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Other Stories

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Flappers and Philosophers

Source: Flappers and Philosophers

“then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses.”