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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

“You've got an awfully kissable mouth.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Source: Gatsby Girls

“Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Winter Dreams

Source: Winter Dreams

“The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p. m.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty−one that everything afterward savors of anti−climax.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“Life cracked like ice!”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Crack-Up

Variant: In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning.
Source: Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)

“Amory: I love you.
Rosalind: I love you- now.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“Art isn't meaningless… It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“Character is plot, plot is character.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I'm not much like myself any more.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Source: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Other Stories

“I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And then one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Variant: It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And then one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Source: The Great Gatsby

“They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made….”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Variant: They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
Source: The Great Gatsby

“All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don't come back.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I…”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“This is all. It's been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn't do - and wouldn't last.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“She knew few words and believed in none.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“that voice was a deathless song.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“If you're in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“You are mine-you know you're mine!" he cried wildly… the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened… the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“Action is Character.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining."
I’m glad Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night