F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea--if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

...and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.It is somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

She was appalled by West Egg’s raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that eroded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man , more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. 'How do you get to West Egg village?' he asked helplessly. I told him. Ans as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He has casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

~ 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.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

~ 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

Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter…Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.Walking alone…was it splendor, or what, we were bound with?Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground withTapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.

~ 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 the beauty in the world.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora's box.Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.

~ 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

We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity, to our infinite disappointment. It won’t be Joan’s [Joan Crawford's] next picture and we are setting it aside awhile till we can think of a way of halfwitting halfwit Hayes and his legion of decency. Pictures needed cleaning up in 1932-33...but because they were suggestive and salacious. Of course the moralists now want to apply that to all strong themes—so the crop of the last two years is feeble and false, unless it deals with children.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Isn’t Hollywood a dump — in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I don't ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

America is a willingness of the heart.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

No grand idea was ever born in a conference but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

First you take a drink then the drink takes a drink then the drink takes you.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writers aren't exactly people they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald