F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes page 7

“It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“She laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated-God, I'm sophisticated!”

“Your photograph is all I have: it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“She admired him; she was used to clutching her hands together in his wake and heaving audible sighs.”

Source: Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Crack-Up

Source: The Crack-Up

“You have a place in my heart no one else ever could have.”

“Have a drink Tom and then you won't feel so foolish to yourself.”

“If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“She was a dark, unenduring little flower - yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”

“There's no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it at all.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Love of the Last Tycoon

Source: The Love of the Last Tycoon

“The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.”

“He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.”

“He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and café, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“You remind me of a smoked cigarette.”

Source: This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Flappers and Philosophers

Source: Flappers and Philosophers

“He loved her, and he would love her until the day he was too old for loving--but he could not have her. So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Winter Dreams

Source: Winter Dreams

“He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“he wanted people to like his mind again-after awhile it might be such a nice place in which to live.”

“They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.”

Source: This Side of Paradise

“Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.”

Source: This Side of Paradise

“I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”

“I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.”

“So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.”

Source: Gatsby Girls

“sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Better let it all alone in the depths of her heart and the depths of the sea.”

Source: This Side of Paradise

“you once liked me, didn't you?, he asked.
LIKED you- I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking.”

Source: The Popular Girl

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“A writer wastes nothing.”

“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.”

“all the time something within her was crying for a decision.
She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.”

Source: The Great Gatsby

“You're a historian. Tell me if there are any bath-tubs in history. I think they've been frightfully neglected.”

“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.”

"Porcelain and Pink"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

“Look at you; you're on The New Democracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the country, read by the men who do things and all that. What's your business? Why, to be as clever, as interesting, and as brilliantly cynical as possible about every man, doctrine, book, or policy that is assigned you to deal with. The more strong lights, the more spiritual scandal you can throw on the matter, the more money they pay you, the more the people buy the issue.”

Letter to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald (5 October 1940)
Quoted, Letters

“The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we've forgotten there’s any other way.”

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

“I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to "succeed" — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future.”

"Amory Blaine" in This Side of Paradise (1920) Bk. 2, Ch. 5
Quoted

“This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the "Smart Set" in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a pattern — a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation.”

Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)

F. Scott Fitzgerald book May Day

On "May Day"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

“To Anthony life was a struggle against death, that waited at every corner. It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the habit of reading in bed — it soothed him. He read until he was tired and often fell asleep with the lights still on.”

“How strange to have failed as a social creature — even criminals do not fail that way — they are the law's "Loyal Opposition," so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.”

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

“As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch — not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward — a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.”

Letter to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald (December 1940)
Quoted, Letters

“There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth — yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams.”

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

“It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.”

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

“There's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate.”

Notebooks
Quoted, Notebooks

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Rich Boy

"The Rich Boy" (1926), paragraph 3.
Often quoted as “The rich are different.”
Quoted

“The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?”

“Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief—that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another:”

"Mr. Icky"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)