F. Scott Fitzgerald - People Quotes

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The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.

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
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen...

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe - and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me.

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
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
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
You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

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
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
Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

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
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

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
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