F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes - Page 4

We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain...
F. Scott Fitzgerald
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
...he told me all the things he liked to THINK he thought in the misty past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I lived here once," the author said after a moment."Here? For a long time?""No. For just a little while when I was young.""It must have been rather cramped.""I didn't notice.""Would you like to try it again?""No. And I couldn't if I wanted to."He shivered slightly and closed the windows. As they went downstairs, the visitor said, half apologetically: "It's really just like all houses, isn't it?"The author nodded."I didn't think it was when I built it, but in the end I suppose it's just like other houses after all.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Always, after he was in bed, there were voices - indefinite, fading, enchanting - just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorites waking dreams.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I detest these underdone men, he thought coldly. Boiled looking! Ought to be shoved back in the oven; just one more minute would do it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Men don’t often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
The tears coursed down her cheeks- not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy — why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The sea, he thought, had treasured it's memories deeper than the faithless land.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath - and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light - light dividing like pearls - forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations -- with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country -- contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness -- hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
She walked rather quickly; she liked to be active, though at times she gave an impression of repose that was at once static and evocative. This was because she knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent, contributing just her share of urbane humor with a precision that approached meagreness. But at the moment when strangers tended to grow uncomfortable in the presence of this economy she would seize the topic and rush off with it, feverishly surprised with herself-- then bring it back and relinquish it abruptly, almost timidly, like an obedient retriever, having been adequate and something more.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds....it is an absolute fact---so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A fellow has to believe in something, Jay-such as the rottenness of humanity.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, "a constant striving" (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it) only adds to this unhappiness in the end--that end that comes to our youth and hope.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I mean the women who, without any of the prerogatives of youth and beauty, demand continual slavery from their men....They sit back complacently and watch their husbands slave for them; and, without furnishing any of the pleasantries of life for their husbands, they demand the sort of continual attention that a charming fiancée might get....They are harridans and shrews who continually nag and scold until the men are driven idiotic.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world--they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's unwanted children. What a fate - to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers. ...Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
That we shall use every discovery of science in the preservation of our children's health goes without saying; but we shall do more than this - we shall give them a free start, not loading them up with our own ideas and experiences, nor advising them to live according to our lights. We were burned in the fire here and there, but - who knows? - fire may not burn our children, and if we warn them away from it they may end by never growing warm. We will not even inflict our cynicism on them as the sentimentality of our fathers was inflicted on us. The most we will do is urge a little doubt, asking that the doubt be exercised on our ideas as well as on all the mortal things in this world.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am glad you are happy--but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I want excitement; and I don’t care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Courage is a sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten remoteness of the afternoon.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful — then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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 important thing is that you should not argue with them [Communists]....Whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind, ‘Fascist,’ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Trotskyist,’ and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Communism...muat of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.
F. Scott Fitzgerald