F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

Action is character.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

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

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

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

Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.

Every act of life, from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner, became an effort. I hated the night when I couldn't sleep and I hated the day because it went toward night.

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

One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Life was a damned muddle - a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of - everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side.

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. - The Great Gatsby.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

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

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

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

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

Well, I can't describe her exactly-except to say that she was beautiful. She was-tremendously alive.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

Forgotten is forgiven.

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.

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.

The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaiety, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.

Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

I'm a cynical idealist.

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

This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.

I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.

that voice was a deathless song.

But I always felt that I'd rather be provincial hot-tamale than soup without seasoning.

You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.

She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game

I talk with the authority of failure - Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.

I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.

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.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing.

Ernest [Hemmingway] was always ready to lend a helping hand to the one on the rung above him.

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.

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.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

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