F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

485 Sourced Quotes

To create souls in men, to create fine happiness and fine despair she must remain deeply proud - proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, to be passionate and possessed.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires....

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped form him - as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement—discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

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

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
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
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

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
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