F. Scott Fitzgerald - Time Quotes

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The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

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
Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Modern life... changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before-populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and-we're dawdling along. My idea is that we've got to go very much faster.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.

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
The change came a long way back, but at first it didn't show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks.

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
He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. - The Great Gatsby.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Men don't often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

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
Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.

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
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something-an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and all the beauty in the world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
One hurries through, even though there's time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy — one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

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