F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

484 Sourced Quotes

People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Stahr's eyes and Kathleen's met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call.

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
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
Begin with an individual, and before you know it you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find you have created - nothing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm not sure what I'll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.

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
I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
A writer's temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. 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. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon—down here everybody thinks he's Christ.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
She laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated-God, I'm sophisticated!

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes-but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
One emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.

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
They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.

F. Scott Fitzgerald