Top 759 Quotes & Sayings by F. Scott Fitzgerald - Page 3

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

So we'll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.

You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.

I can’t tell you just how wonderful she is. I don’t want you to know. I don’t want any one to know.

And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

Happiness is the relief after extreme tension

I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

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.

I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.

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.

Don't say 'wife.' I'm your mistress. Wife's such an ugly word. Your 'permanent mistress' is so much more tangible and desirable… .

The world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility

good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handle with gloves.

in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes

Don't forget who you are and where you come from.

Long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.

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.

I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.

For what it’s worth, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be.

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

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.

I used to build dreams about you.

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

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

There's no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it at all.

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

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.

You remind me of a smoked cigarette.

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.

I want to tell you about your heart— you've probably been neglecting your heart—and you don’t know.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway

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.

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

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.

Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost uncanny pull at each others hearts.

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

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

She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.

This is perhaps the best feeling in the world. I love going to sleep at night and wondering what weird and wonderful dreams I'm going to have however I always prolong sleep as long as possible, immeasurably happy simply listening to the sound of my fiancees breathing and feeling his arms around me. It's when you fall in love with these little things that you know you're truly in love.

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

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.

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

I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.

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.

I don't care about truth. I want some happiness.

I found something! Courage--just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always.

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

Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that.

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

Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?

He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.

She saw him the first day on board, and then her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.

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.

Even when everything seems rotten you can't trust that judgment. It's the sum of all your judgments that counts.

"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now - isn't that enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly. "I did love him once-but I loved you too." Gatsby's eyes opened and closed. "You loved me too?" he repeated. "Even that's a lie," said Tom savagely. "She didn't know you were alive. Why - there're things between Daisy and me that you'll never know, things that neither of us can ever forget."

So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.