F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

My own rule is to let everything alone.

~ 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

All I think of ever is that I love you.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

One o’ clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping sentences of an enraptured man. Four o’clock: her little feet moving to melody, her face distinct in the crowd, her partner happy as a petted puppy and mad as the immemorial hatter…

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

She was one of those people who are famous beyond their actual achievement.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis-- a moulding of the confusion of life into form.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The movies remind me of the Triangle Club at Princeton. I used to belong to it, and we always started out firm in our decision to create new and startling things. We always ended up by producing the same old show. In the beginning, our enthusiasm and ideals discarded as rubbish all the old fossilized plots.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual «There!» yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which 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

The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Whether it's something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday I must start out with an emotion, one that's close to me and that I can understand.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever, I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren't just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on - I've seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have been hung — glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality - he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

A man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief- that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never...intended. So they said to one another: Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever that will mock the credulity of man...We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over- and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no more nonsense in the world.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most of the big shore places were closed now. And there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of the ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away till gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes, A fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. For a transitory, enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent. Face to face, for the last time in history, with something commensurate to its capacity for wonder.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe - why, intelligence never built a steam-engine! Circumstances built a steam-engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It's always a delusion when I see what you don't want to see (Nicole to Dick).

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

C'mon, Amory. Your romance is overYou don't know how true you spoke. No idea. 'At's the whole trouble

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes... He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrap-book of his life.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes...

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Take off that darn fur coat!...Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I've always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Deep in his heart, he wondered if he was after all worse than this man or the next. He knew that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the result of circumstances and environment; that often when he raged at himself as an egotist something would whisper ingratiatingly: No. Genius!

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over...We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them-

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else's clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald