F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

485 Sourced Quotes

When a girl feels that she's perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That's charm

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression— yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarecly tolerated guest at a party she was giving.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Once we were one person, and always it will be a little that way.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafés in Mont Marte, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them-with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro's troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances, which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro's warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm thirty, I said. I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

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
Then she added in a sort of childish delight: 'We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!' She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss. 'It's impossible to be both together,' said John grimly. 'People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two...

F. Scott Fitzgerald
'What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?' cried Daisy, 'and the day after that, and the next thirty years?'

F. Scott Fitzgerald
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them—always thinking people are so important—especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it—on the inside.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.

F. Scott Fitzgerald