F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”

"Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains..."

“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her, and it is the beginning of everything.”

"You never know what's coming for you."

“In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o' clock in the morning, day after day.”

"'You'll find another.'
'God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.'"

"Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen..."

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

"The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky."

"For the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions."

"Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

"The rich get richer and the poor get — children.”

“'They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.'”

“I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.”

"As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership."

“Her voice is full of money.”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

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

"In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars."

"Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope."

"...one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty−one that everything afterward savors of anti−climax."

"I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't."

"He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself."

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

"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."

"'Think how you love me,' she whispered.'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.'
'You'll always be like this to me.'
'Oh no; but promise me you'll remember.' Her tears were falling. 'I'll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight.'"

""Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.
"You always look so cool," she repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw."

"Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice, and I’ll tell you a story."

"It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being."

"I want leisure to read—an immense amount."

"I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me."

"All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase-- 'I love you.'"

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

"I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library."

"Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away."

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."

"Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure."

"Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry."

"All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.'"

"Then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses."

"They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered."

"Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."

"For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk."

"You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming."

"And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life."

"With people like us our home is where we are not."

"So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight."