F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (242 Quotes)

The truth was that Jay Gatsbysprang from his Platonic conception of himself.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

It takes a genius to whine appealingly.

It isn't given for us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

After Gatsbys death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes power of correction.

If all your clothes are worn to the same state, it means you go out too much.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God... and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented... Jay Gatsby... and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

Whenever you feel like criticising anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

There are no second acts in American lives.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.

Always willing to lend a helping hand to the one above him.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved-to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses.

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.

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.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she didn't, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot beacause I knew different things from her....Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do Gatsby

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

Gatsby turned out all right at the end it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

Civilizations going to pieces, broke out Tom violently. Ive gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited - they went there.

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

Theyre a rotten crowd, I shouted across the lawn. Youre worth the whole damn bunch put together.'

He was a son of Godand he must be about His Fathers business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

The rich get richer and the poor get children.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

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.

In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year....Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.

I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors eyes a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsbys house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over.

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.

Progress was a labyrinth . . . people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it.