F. Scott Fitzgerald: Quotes about the world

F. Scott Fitzgerald was American novelist and screenwriter. Explore interesting quotes on world.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: 822 quotes49 likes

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Ice Palace

Source: The Ice Palace

“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

“He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

“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:”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

“Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notebook E, edited by Edmund Wilson (1945)
Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)

“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self-respect. And it's these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. You’re still a Catholic, but Zelda’s the only God I have left now.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Letter to Isabelle Amorous (February 1920)
Quoted, Letters

“He doesn't believe that public swimming-pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the world; moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)