F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

485 Sourced Quotes

She was a dark, unenduring little flower - yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire—I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Actually that's my secret — I can't even talk about you to anybody because I don't want any more people to know how wonderful you are.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
All the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I think they're very attractive,' Abe agreed. 'I just don't think they're attractive, that's all.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice-box with the left overs.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Well, I can't describe her exactly-except to say that she was beautiful. She was-tremendously alive.

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
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
Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It appears that every man's insomnia is as different from his neighbor's as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

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
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

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

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald