F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. (F Scott Fitzgerald Quotes)

“A man does not recover from such jolts- he becomes a different person and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“A man’s true character is revealed in times of adversity.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“A returned battalion of the National Guard paraded through the streets with open ranks for their dead and then stepped down out of romance forever and sold you things over the counters of local stores.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Short Stories

“A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She’s too pretty.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another – as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths. ”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby’s party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“After marriage came elation, and then, gradually, the growth of weariness. Responsibility descended upon Merlin, the responsibility of making his thirty dollars a week and her twenty suffice to keep them respectably fat and to hide with decent garments the evidence that they were.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Short Stories

“Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“Aging isn’t something to fear or be ashamed of. It’s a natural part of the journey.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don’t come back.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Ambition knows no boundaries, it will drive a man to achieve the impossible.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Amory looked at Myra with a glance in which emotions were Openly and hideously mixed.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“Amory resented such an avocation, as he resented people who were in a hurry, but which he revered more in his heart than anything in the world, just as he revered money, spent legacies, college professors and cetera. He resented it because it seemed unsuitable for a man who was learning to play with ideas, yet he was himself often wild with a desire to do something outstanding.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life–not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Offshore Pirate

“And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it will be well to pass over as quickly as possible. There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button; his wife had ceased to attract him.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“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
The Great Gatsby

“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Art isn’t meaningless… It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“As long as we’re fighting about what color your children are going to be, there won’t be the brain power to solve the world’s problems.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“At both ends of life man needed nourishment: a breast – a shrine. Something to lay himself beside when no one wanted him further, and shoot a bullet into his head.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bernice Bobs Her Hair

“At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“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
This Side of Paradise

“Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– 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.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible,” come true.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“Benjamin started; an almost chemical change seemed to dissolve and recompose the very elements of his body. A rigour passed over him, blood rose into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a steady thumping in his ears. It was first love.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“But a frantic inspection of the boys’ department revealed no suits to fit the new-born Button. He blamed the store, of course – in such cases it is the thing to blame the store.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“But at home he felt a curious loneliness as his butler made him tea in the samovar. It was the old hurt come back, heavy and delightful. When he took up the first of two scripts that were his evening stint, that presently he would visualise line by line on the screen, he waited a moment, thinking of Minna. He explained to her that it was really nothing, that no one could ever be like she was, that he was sorry.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work- and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“By the time he was twelve years old his parents had grown used to him. Indeed, so strong is the force of custom that they no longer felt that he was different from any other child – except when some curious anomaly reminded them of the fact.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Children adored him because he was like a child; youth reveled in his company because he was still a youth, and couldn’t be shocked.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“Dear, don’t think of getting out of bed yet. I’ve always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“December tumbled like a dead leaf from the calendar.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
All the Sad Young Men

“Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Do you believe in bobbed hair?” asked G. Reece in the same undertone.
“I think it’s unmoral,” affirmed Bernice gravely. “But, of course, you’ve either got to amuse people or feed’em or shock’em.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bernice Bobs Her Hair

“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.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Excuse me for being so intellectual. I know you would prefer something nice and feminine and affectionate.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda

“Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you–it’s a wall that an active you runs up against.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“Failure is often the greatest motivator for success.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“Fatigue was a drug as well as a poison, and Stahr apparently derived some rare almost physical pleasure from working lightheaded with weariness.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Good luck to you and bad luck to your theories.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“He found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tales of the Jazz Age

“He had never met anyone like her before. He sought her jauntily but earnestly to send him away; he didn’t want to fall in love. He wasn’t coming to see her any more–already she had haunted too many of his ways.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a ‘nice’ girl could be.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“He strolled out onto the wide, semidark veranda, where couples were scattered at tables, filling the lantern-hung night with vague words and hazy laughter.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bernice Bobs Her Hair

“He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than anyone else he knows.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
All the Sad Young Men

“He was annoyed with Lew because he had thought it was the President and had changed his manner, acting as if it were. He felt a little ridiculous, but Kathleen felt sorry and liked him better because it had been an orang-outang.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“He was born sleepless, without a talent for rest or the desire for it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“He was his wife’s man and not his own.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“He was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“He wondered idly whether she was a poor conversationalist because she got no attention or got no attention because she was a poor conversationalist.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bernice Bobs Her Hair

“Her voice is full of money.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“He’s sensitive and I don’t want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn’t care about him.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“His mind tired–tired with nothing, tired with everything, with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“How I feel is that if I wanted anything I’d take it. That’s what I’ve always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven’t room for any other desires.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“I can honestly say … I have not wasted a single moment of this marvelous life!”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“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
Tender Is the Night

“I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“I don’t think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Short Stories

“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“I grew up thinking that writer and secretary were the same, except that a writer usually smelled of cocktails and came more often to meals.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and when she gave me the bill you’d of thought she had my appendix out.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“I hate dainty minds,’ answered Marjorie. ‘But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Flappers and Philosophers

“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
The Great Gatsby

“I hope something happens. I’m restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“I love her and that is the beginning and end of everything.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to ‘succeed’-and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills-domestic, professional and personal-then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“I possess the most valuable experience, the experience of the race, for in spite of going to college I’ve managed to pick up a good education.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Flappers and Philosophers

“I suppose he smiled at Cody—he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“I want leisure to read—an immense amount.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Short Stories

“I want to be where people are young and ardent and beautiful. So far as I can see, all the rest of life is only dirty-gray.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe – and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Short Stories

“I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses … We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o’clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda

“I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Flappers and Philosophers

“I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“I’ve enjoyed imagining you were my son, that perhaps when I was young I went into a state of coma and begat you, and when I came to, had no recollection of it… it’s the paternal instinct, Amory.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“I’d rather marry a man of fifty and be taken care of than marry a man of thirty and take care of him.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter–as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Short Stories

“I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“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
The Great Gatsby

“I’m merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Flappers and Philosophers

“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.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“In 1920 Roscoe Button’s first child was born. During the attendant festivities, however, no one thought it “the thing” to mention, that the little grubby boy, apparently about ten years of age who played around the house with lead soldiers and a miniature circus, was the new baby’s own grandfather.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“In a world driven by success, it’s easy to lose sight of what truly matters.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“In any case you mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“In her less important moments she returned to America, met Stephen Blaine and married him—this almost entirely because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“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
The Short Stories

“In the pursuit of pleasure, they forgot the consequences and became damned souls.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“In the strangeness of the brightening day it seemed presumptuous that with this feeble, broken instrument of his mind he had ever tried to think.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“In this era, beauty is celebrated, but it ultimately leads to destruction.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“Into a dozen minds entered a quick suspicion, a rumour of scandal. Could it be that behind the scenes with this couple, apparently so in love, lurked some curious antipathy? Why else this streak of fire across such a cloudless heaven?”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Flappers and Philosophers

“It happens that I want you, and so I just haven’t room for any other desires.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“It is never too late to become the person we were meant to be.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows- it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of sky-scrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray heaven.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tales of the Jazz Age

“It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tales of the Jazz Age

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“It was midsummer, but fresh water from the gasping sprinklers made the lawn glitter like spring.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“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.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“It’s a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed is you.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“It’s completely unemotional; it’s uninspiring, dear God! I’m not happy!”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“It’s funny, but it seems as though some girl is always taking advantage of me.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy — one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Flappers and Philosophers

“Life has puffed and blown itself into a summer day, and clouds and spring billow over the heavens as if calendars were a listing of mathematical errors.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda

“Life is a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Life is not measured by the years you live, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“Life is so damned hard, so damned hard… It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Love is a powerful force that can both build and destroy.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“Men don’t often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“Misfortune is liable to make me a damn bad man”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tales of the Jazz Age

“Money can buy many things, but it can never buy happiness.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“Most of us are content to exist and breed and fight for the right to do both, and the dominant idea, the foredoomed attest to control one’s destiny, is reserved for the fortunate or unfortunate few.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Flappers and Philosophers

“Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“No matter how many years we have, we all have the power to make a difference in the world.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“No matter what happens, no matter how far you seem to be away from where you want to be, never stop believing that you will somehow make it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“Note also in the epilogue that I want to show that Stahr left certain harm behind him just as he left good behind him.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“Nothing could have survived our life.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda

“Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“Oh, you want too much! I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“People fall in and out of love all the time. I wonder how they manage it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“People like you must create. If you don’t create, you will become a menace to society.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bernice Bobs Her Hair

“Perhaps she too would see the sunset and pause for a moment, turning, remembering, before he faded with her sleep into the past. This night’s dusk would cover up forever the sun and the trees and the flowers and laughter of his young world.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sensible Thing

“Poetry is dying first. It’ll be absorbed into prose sooner or later.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Real help comes from a stronger person whom you respect. And their sympathy is all the bigger because it’s impersonal.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Short Stories

“Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“She admired him; she was used to clutching her hands together in his wake and heaving audible sighs. ”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, as though she realized at last what she was doing—and as though she had never, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done now. It was too late.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“She opened the door of the veranda and pulled in two wicker chairs, drying them off. He watched her move, intently, yet half afraid that her body would fail somewhere and break the spell. He had watched women in screen tests and seen their beauty vanish second by second, as if a lovely statue had begun to walk with the meagre joints of a paper doll. But Kathleen was ruggedly set on the balls of her feet – the fragility was, as it should be, an illusion.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“She told him in a dozen ways, of which the best was without words, how she had missed him. Her emotion reassured him, promised his anxious heart that everything would be all right”.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sensible Thing

“She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“She wanted what most women want, but she wanted it much more fiercely and passionately.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“She was a beautiful fool, and he was a damned dreamer.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“She was a dark, unenduring little flower – yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“She was dressed in pale green, and a gold ribbon bound back her dark, straight hair like a crown.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sensible Thing

“She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“She was gone, definitely, finally gone. Until now he had half unconsciously cherished the hope deep in his heart that some day she would need him and send for him.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one – the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
All the Sad Young Men

“So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Some people are born old, and some never seem so.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“Someday I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“Sometimes, the greatest love stories are the ones that remain unfinished.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“Stahr’s eyes and Kathleen’s met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“Strange children should smile at each other and say, “Let’s play.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“Success is not measured by the number of possessions, but by the impact we have on others.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“Thanks again for saving me. Someday, I’ll save you too.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda

“That’s quite different. I told you I wouldn’t want to tie my life to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made any sweepin’ generalities.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Flappers and Philosophers

“That’s what they mean by the love that passeth understanding: That pride, that furious desire to hide that abject nakedness which we bring here with us, carry with us into operating rooms, carry stubbornly and furiously with us into the earth again.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“The allure of the past can be both captivating and destructive.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“The bottle of whiskey—the second one—was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who ‘felt just as good on nothing at all.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“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
The Great Gatsby

“The dripping became a flow and formed an oily pool that glistened brightly, reflecting a dozen tremulous moons on its quivering bosom.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tales of the Jazz Age

“The feel of her head against his shoulder, of her familiar body, sent a shock of emotion over him. His arms holding her had a tendency to tighten around her.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sensible Thing

“The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“The idea of a slow approach to the luxury of leisure drove him wild. He was, of course, progressing toward it, but, like a child eating his ice cream so slowly that he couldn’t taste it at all.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Offshore Pirate

“The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“The intoxicating allure of power can blind us to the consequences of our actions.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“The natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“The past is a ghost that haunts us, but it’s up to us to let it go or be consumed by it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“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. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“The thing to do is to forget about the heat. You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself…he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“The world of glamour and fame can be an empty and lonely place.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“The world only exists in your eyes– your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you’re trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“Their beauty masked their inner turmoil and damnation.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“Their luxurious lifestyle was a facade, hiding their internal damnation.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Short Stories

“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
The Crack-Up

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“There are two kinds of people in this world—the beautiful and the damned.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“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.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“There was a midsummer restlessness abroad-early August with imprudent loves and impulsive crimes. With little more to expect from summer, one tried anxiously to live in the present-or, if there was no present, to invent one.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“There was a midsummer restlessness abroad—early August with imprudent loves and impulsive crimes.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“There’s one thing you’ve got to say for coal: it puts muscles on your soul.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“There’s something pathetic about Penelope like there was about Daisy, but she’s a woman and that redeems her.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“They conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“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.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“This is a story in heat. It will be given up to the overtraveled reader to supply the things which he knows very well were inexpressible.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“This is Cecilia taking up the story. I think it would be most interesting to follow my own movements at this point, as this is a time in my life that I am ashamed of. What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“This is your child, and you’ll have to make the best of it. We’re going to ask you to take him home with you as soon as possible-sometime to-day.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“Time is our greatest enemy, yet it’s also what makes life so precious.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned

“We are all flawed, but it’s in our imperfections that we find our true beauty.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“We are all products of our environment, but it’s up to us to rise above it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“We are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want anyone to know or than we know ourselves.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Short Stories

“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
This Side of Paradise

“We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“We’ll meet you on some corner. I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged–the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Short Stories

“When his grandfather’s initial antagonism wore off, Benjamin and that gentleman took enormous pleasure in one another’s company. They would sit for hours, these two, so far apart in age and experience, and, like old cronies, discuss with tireless monotony the slow events of the day. Benjamin felt more at ease in his grandfather’s presence than in his parents’ – they seemed always somewhat in awe of him and, despite the dictatorial authority they exercised over him, frequently addressed him as ‘Mr.‘”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“When his son was dressed Mr. Button regarded him with depression. The costume consisted of dotted socks, pink pants, and a belted blouse with a wide white collar. Over the latter waved the long whitish beard, drooping almost to the waist. The effect was not good.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“When you get drunk you don’t tear anything apart except yourself.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“When you’re not bound by time, getting old is meaningless.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It’s better to be cold and young than to love. It’s happened to me before but never like this – so accidental – just when everything was going well.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“Why shouldn’t he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase– ‘I love you”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Offshore Pirate

“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
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“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
Bernice Bobs Her Hair

“You are meant to lose the people you love. How else would you know how important they are to you?”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“You can call it courage, but your courage is really built, after all, on a pride of birth. You were bred to that defiant attitude. On my gray days even courage is one of the things that’s gray and lifeless. ”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Offshore Pirate

“You don’t have to dance—just get out there on the floor and shake.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tales of the Jazz Age

“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them–always thinking people are so important–especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it–on the inside.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love of the Last Tycoon

“You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“You’re just the romantic age,” she continued- “fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is- oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.” – Hildegarde”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“You’ll fall in love with me yet. Don’t tell me you won’t.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“Your life is defined by opportunities…even the ones you miss”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“Your photograph is all I have: it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda

“You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“You’re not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not… No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

“You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night

“Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tales of the Jazz Age

“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
This Side of Paradise