F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

484 Sourced Quotes

But there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Better let it all alone in the depths of her heart and the depths of the sea.

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
I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It is youth's felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future

F. Scott Fitzgerald
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.

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
Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alivewith chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but 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
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
What do you think of that? It's stopped raining." I'm glad Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
In a few days I'll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod-always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults-rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
If you're strong enough, there are no precedents.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy — one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

F. Scott Fitzgerald