F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (242 Quotes)

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.

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.

They were so sorry, dear; they went down to meet each other in a taxi, honey; they had preferences in smiles and had met in Hindustan, and shortly afterward they must have quarrelled, for nobody knew and nobody seemed to care - yet finally one of them had gone and left the other crying, only to feel blue, to feel sad.

At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

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, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.

She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

Unlike lovers they possessed no past; unlike man and wife, they possessed no future; yet up to in this morning Nicole had liked Abe better than anyone except Dick--and he had been heavy, belly-frightened, with love for her for years.

At this point Jordan and I tried to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we remain - as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions.

His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.

The words seemed to bite physically into 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.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

Forgotten is forgiven.

If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I'll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name.

Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Gatsby stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast...and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.