F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

484 Sourced Quotes

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there's a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically when they read... Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I've noticed that the children of other nations always seem precocious. That's because the strange manners of their elders have caught our attention most and the children echo those manners enough to seem like their parents.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Baltimore is warm but pleasant... I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
My imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
My latest tendency is to collapse about 11:00 and with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, and tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven't a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody....

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life was a damned muddle - a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of - everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains...

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The two basic stories of all times are Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer-the charm of women and the courage of men.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

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
The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It's just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they're never coming again, and I'm not really getting all I could out of them.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
How I feel is that if I wanted anything I'd take it. That's what I've always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven't room for any other desires.

F. Scott Fitzgerald