F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

485 Sourced Quotes

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
In crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes

F. Scott Fitzgerald
For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!

F. Scott Fitzgerald
So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?

F. Scott Fitzgerald
France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Love is fragile — she was thinking — but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love-words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.

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
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
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
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
It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle, complimentary way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you — like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist — or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer... writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News.'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.

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
Sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

F. Scott Fitzgerald