Authors — Quotes

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes: 47

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
The victor belongs to the spoils.
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The Great Gatsby
I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
The Great Gatsby
The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
The Great Gatsby
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
This Side of Paradise
Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
The Great Gatsby
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.
And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
The Great Gatsby
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.
The Great Gatsby
Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.
I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.
The Great Gatsby
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 romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won't.
This Side of Paradise
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.
The Great Gatsby
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
The Great Gatsby
You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.
The Great Gatsby
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
The Great Gatsby
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
This Side of Paradise
It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.
This Side of Paradise
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.
Tender Is the Night
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.
The Great Gatsby
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.
The Great Gatsby
I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
The Great Gatsby
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.
Tender is the Night
I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.
Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.
The Great Gatsby
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.
All the Sad Young Men
An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.
If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.
Tender is the Night & The Last Tycoon
You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.
This Side of Paradise
Think how you love me,"she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.
Tender Is the Night
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?
This Side of Paradise
My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.
Tender Is the Night
Human sympathy has its limits.
The Great Gatsby
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.
Tender Is the Night
You've got an awfully kissable mouth.
Gatsby Girls
For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you find you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.
I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.
Gatsby Girls
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.