F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

484 Sourced Quotes

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
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
The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams

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
She was dazzling — alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.

F. Scott Fitzgerald