F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

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

The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I want excitement; and I don’t care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I am glad you are happy--but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

That we shall use every discovery of science in the preservation of our children's health goes without saying; but we shall do more than this - we shall give them a free start, not loading them up with our own ideas and experiences, nor advising them to live according to our lights. We were burned in the fire here and there, but - who knows? - fire may not burn our children, and if we warn them away from it they may end by never growing warm. We will not even inflict our cynicism on them as the sentimentality of our fathers was inflicted on us. The most we will do is urge a little doubt, asking that the doubt be exercised on our ideas as well as on all the mortal things in this world.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's unwanted children. What a fate - to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers. ...Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world--they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I mean the women who, without any of the prerogatives of youth and beauty, demand continual slavery from their men....They sit back complacently and watch their husbands slave for them; and, without furnishing any of the pleasantries of life for their husbands, they demand the sort of continual attention that a charming fiancée might get....They are harridans and shrews who continually nag and scold until the men are driven idiotic.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, a constant striving (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it) only adds to this unhappiness in the end--that end that comes to our youth and hope.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

A fellow has to believe in something, Jay-such as the rottenness of humanity.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds....it is an absolute fact---so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

She walked rather quickly; she liked to be active, though at times she gave an impression of repose that was at once static and evocative. This was because she knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent, contributing just her share of urbane humor with a precision that approached meagreness. But at the moment when strangers tended to grow uncomfortable in the presence of this economy she would seize the topic and rush off with it, feverishly surprised with herself-- then bring it back and relinquish it abruptly, almost timidly, like an obedient retriever, having been adequate and something more.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the morning you were never violently sorry-- you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations -- with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country -- contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness -- hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath - and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light - light dividing like pearls - forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The sea, he thought, had treasured it's memories deeper than the faithless land.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The tears coursed down her cheeks- not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy — why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Beauty and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Men don’t often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I detest these underdone men, he thought coldly. Boiled looking! Ought to be shoved back in the oven; just one more minute would do it.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Always, after he was in bed, there were voices - indefinite, fading, enchanting - just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorites waking dreams.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

...he told me all the things he liked to THINK he thought in the misty past.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain...

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald