F. Scott Fitzgerald - Life Quotes

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No," interrupted Marcia emphatically. "And you're a sweet boy. Come here and kiss me." Horace stopped quickly in front of her. "Why do you want me to kiss you?" he asked intently. "Do you just go round kissing people?" "Why, yes," admitted Marcia, unruffled. "'At's all life is. Just going around kissing people.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Why shouldn't he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase— 'I love you

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
He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.

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
Her beautiful eyes and lips were very grave as she made her choice, and Anthony thought again how naive was her every gesture; she took all the things of life for hers to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved—so easy to be loved—so hard to love.

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
In a few days I'll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod-always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults-rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaiety, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
That was always my experience-a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton.... However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
When Eleanor's arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her— she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man's duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I.

F. Scott Fitzgerald