F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

485 Sourced Quotes

Egyptian Proverb: The worst things:
To be in bed and sleep not,
To want for one who comes not,
To try to please and please not.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You're just the romantic age, she continued- fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is- oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty. - Hildegarde

F. Scott Fitzgerald
In the spring of '27, something bright and alien flashed across the sky, a young Minnesotan who seemed to have nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and for a moment, people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of their old best dreams.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was....

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire's bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.' He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
They're a rotten crowd', I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Men don't often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he's any good.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life—it can be a superabundance of interest...

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses—bound for dust—mortal—

F. Scott Fitzgerald
What a wonderful song, she thought-everything was wonderful tonight, most of all this romantic scene in the den with their hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm limousines and in low cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering trees-only the boy might change, and this one was so nice.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. - The Great Gatsby.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush-these alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth-bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love's exaltation.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes-there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

F. Scott Fitzgerald