F. Scott Fitzgerald - Life Quotes

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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
Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted 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
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
Every act of life, from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner, became an effort. I hated the night when I couldn't sleep and I hated the day because it went toward night.

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
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
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
And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...It has no day.

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
Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

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

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
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
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
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

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
He did not understand all he had heard, but from his clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.

F. Scott Fitzgerald