F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - people didn't get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.

~ 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

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

~ 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

There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.

~ 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

I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

...I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved - and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact - and rather deeply wise. More than that, what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Cather's: We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't change the past.''Can't change the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

no girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it's every girl for herself.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

We'll all be failures?Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of - of ineffectual and sad, and - oh, how can I tell you?

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated a surrender with equanimity. Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him - like an actor kissed in a picture.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Under the glass porte-cochère of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became grey and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxicabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

~ 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

Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The present was the thing--work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

That most limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don't like this kiss-and-forget.''But I don't want to argue. I think it's wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can't it'll be time to argue.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life--not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. ...He aspires to create new and original works. His way is alone. If he succumbs to ideologies, he turns into a mouthpiece. He must hang on to his identity for dear life. In the end he must rely on his own judgment. It’s the only way to survive as a writer and an artist.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald