F. Scott Fitzgerald: Quotes about life

F. Scott Fitzgerald was American novelist and screenwriter. Explore interesting quotes on life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: 822   quotes 49   likes

“There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Variant: The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

Life , World , Loneliness

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. 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. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Life , World , Smile , Hope

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Life , Tree , Summer

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Life

“Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Life , Alcohol , Color

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Life , Loneliness , Night

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"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.

Life , Waiting , Weather

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

Life

“Life is so damned hard, so damned hard… It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Life , People , Hurt

“All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase— 'I love you.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Offshore Pirate

Quoted, Short Stories
Source: The Offshore Pirate

Love , Life

“If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Source: Tender is the Night & The Last Tycoon

Life , People , Feeling

“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

Life

“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

Life , Smile , Time

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Life , Feeling

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Life , War , Sport

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life , Pleasure , Cheating , Happiness