Top 759 Quotes & Sayings by F. Scott Fitzgerald - Page 5

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

I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.

The sign of intelligence is the ability to carry opposed thoughts at the same time.

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.

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.

He did not understand all he had heard, but from his clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad.

Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power-at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.

One thin's sure and nothing's surer The rich get richer and the poor get - children. In the meantime, In between time...

A man's social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich.

It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.

We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.

I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.

Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.

His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed —that voice was a deathless song.

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

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.

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.

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

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.

She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself

The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

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. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.

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

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired

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

When a man is tired of life on his 21st birthday it indicates that he is rather tired of something in himself.

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

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

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

Conditions in the [movie] industry somehow propose the paradox: "We brought you here for your individuality but while you're here we insist that you do everything to conceal it.

She wouldn't let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up in a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.

Everything that begins, begins with blood.

Very strong personalities must confine themselves in mutual conversation to very gentle subjects.

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.

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.

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

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.

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation - with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.

Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!

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. 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.

Take off that darn fur coat!...Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows.

He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

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.

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others -- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner -- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

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.

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.

The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

My latest tendency is to collapse about 11:00 and with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, and tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven't a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody.

Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

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.

The rich are different from us.

why shouldn't he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase-- 'I love you