F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

485 Sourced Quotes

That's the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he'd kissed a girl, everyone knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same, everyone knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Listen, little Elia: draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You are mine-you know you're mine!" he cried wildly...the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened...the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
But at three o'clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn't work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

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
The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.

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
Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
When he buys his ties he has to ask if gin will make them run.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed —that voice was a deathless song.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Isn't Hollywood a dump-in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and—and in love before they're born.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

F. Scott Fitzgerald