F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

484 Sourced Quotes

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There are no second acts in American lives.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Either you think - or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You'll find another.' God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
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. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He did not understand all he had heard, but from his clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Never walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is your most vulnerable part-once in bed, you're safe; he may lie around under the bed all night, but you're safe as daylight. If you still have doubts pull the blanket over your head.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I guess I'm the Black Death,' he said slowly. 'I don't seem to bring people happiness any more.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was a grey day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He's sensitive and I don't want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn't care about him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered Listen, a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Oh, Joe, can't producers ever be wrong? I'm a good writer—honest. I thought you were going to play fair.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

F. Scott Fitzgerald