F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is all. It's been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn't do - and wouldn't last.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Character is plot, plot is character.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

There was not a moving up into vacated places, there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it--later in life he almost completely slew it--but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys... unscrupulousness... the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil... a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty... a shifting sense of honor... an unholy selfishness... a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity... he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to pass as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world... with this background did Amory drift into adolescence.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur standing had very little value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably be her principal study for years to come. She had begun as he had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room conversation culled from a slightly older set. Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of blasé sophistication. She had lived in a larger city and had slightly an advantage in range. But she accepted his pose--it was one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair. He was aware that he was getting this particular favor now because she had been coached; he knew that he stood for merely the best game in sight, and that he would have to improve his opportunity before he lost his advantage. So they proceeded with an infinite guile that would have horrified her parents.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

He found that the business of optimism was no mean task.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it's carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It's only when the settlement work has gone on for months that one realizes how bad things are. As our secretary said to me, your finger-nails never seem dirty until you wash your hands.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Her fine high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet and shining, the colour of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood -- she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis - these had been his ingredients when he entered St. Regis'. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay to conceal the Amory plus Beatrice from the ferreting eyes of a boarding school, so St. Regis' had very painfully drilled Beatrice out of him and begun to lay down new and more conventional planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis' and Amory were unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself changed. Those qualities for which he had suffered: his moodiness, his tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the St. Regis' Tattler; it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very vanities that had not long ago been contemptible weaknesses.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ — and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing — oh, that eternal hand!— a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The grass is full of ghosts tonight.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.' They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees. 'You know,' whispered Tom, 'what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that...

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood, she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely—taking almost a delight in the thrust. Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say. Often he would eventually trace these portentous reticences to some physical discomfort—of these she never complained until they were over—or to some carelessness or presumption in him, or to an unsatisfactory dish at dinner, but even then the means by which she created the infinite distances she spread about herself were a mystery, buried somewhere back in those twenty-two years of unwavering pride.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

In April war was declared with Germany. Wilson and his cabinet—a cabinet that in its lack of distinction was strangely reminiscent of the twelve apostles—let loose the carefully starved dogs of war, and the press began to whoop hysterically against the sinister morals, sinister philosophy, and sinister music produced by the Teutonic temperament. Those who fancied themselves particularly broad-minded made the exquisite distinction that it was only the German Government which aroused them to hysteria; the rest were worked up to a condition of retching indecency. Any song which contained the word mother and the word kaiser was assured of a tremendous success. At last every one had something to talk about—and almost every one fully enjoyed it, as though they had been cast for parts in a sombre and romantic play.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside his bed in the hotel tolling frantically, and remembered that he had left word to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily, his clothes in a pile by his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast in silence, and then sauntered out to get some air. Amory's mind was working slowly, trying to assimilate what had happened and separate from the chaotic imagery that stacked his memory the bare shreds of truth. If the morning had been cold and gray he could have grasped the reins of the past in an instant, but it was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in May, when the air of Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine. How much or how little Sloane remembered Amory did not care to know; he apparently had none of the nervous tension that was gripping Amory and forcing his mind back and forth like a shrieking saw.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

My courage is faith--faith in the eternal resilience of me--that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide--not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often--and the female hell is deadlier than the male.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I found something! Courage--just that, courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Rather nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair? -

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald