F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (242 Quotes)

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

Let us show our friendship for a man when he is living and not after he is dead.

The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alivewith chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.

Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.

He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.

On either side the fields were beneficently tranquil; the space through which the cavalcade moved was high and limitless. In the country there was less noise as though they were all listening atavistically for wolves in the wide snow.

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.

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

He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.

I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets... I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

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

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.

Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains...

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.

Then he put in a call for Nicole in Zurich, remembering so many things as he waited, and wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be.

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

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.

I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

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

What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?

His voice, with some faint Irish melody running through it, wooed the world, yet she felt the layer of hardness in him, of self-control and of self-discipline, her own virtues. Oh, she chose him, and Nicole, lifting her head saw her choose him, heard a little sigh at the fact that he was already possessed.

She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter - like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination, Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it, and everything all at once seemed gorgeous.

There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.

And so we beat on, books against the critics, borne back ceaslessly into rewrites.

He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them-with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro's troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances, which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro's warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.

The officer looked at Daisy while she speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime.

What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?

I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.

She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper.

They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.

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.

He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real.

I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration-even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!

Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning.

The only thing a girl is good for is being a beautiful little fool.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.

If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.

She plucked a twig and broke it, but she found no spring in it.

They were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others.

As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.

I was too absorbed to be responsive

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.

The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the unclear voices of children, already gathered like crikets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight.

Wilson's glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small gray clouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.

I'm not much like myself any more.