F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

I see you're looking at my cuff buttons." I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now.

Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.

Have a drink Tom and then you won't feel so foolish to yourself.

I am a woman and my business is to hold things together. My business is to tear them apart.

Murder your darlings.

we both fitted. If our corners were not rubbed off they were at least pulled in. But deep in us both was something that made us require more for happiness. I didn't know what I wanted

Stahr's eyes and Kathleen's met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call.

Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.

My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.

...one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.

Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on.

smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.

It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future

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

He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and café, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.

She was incurably dishonest.

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

I think they're very attractive,' Abe agreed. 'I just don't think they're attractive, that's all.

He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.

Better let it all alone in the depths of her heart and the depths of the sea.

She admired him; she was used to clutching her hands together in his wake and heaving audible sighs.

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

I'm not much like myself any more.

...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.

How I feel is that if I wanted anything I'd take it. That's what I've always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven't room for any other desires.

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

The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.

but they were frightened at his survivant will, once a will to live, now become a will to die.

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.

Englishmen must have an island.

Once a change of direction has begun, even though it's the wrong one, it still tends to clothe itself as thoroughly in the appurtenances of Tightness as if it had been a natural all along.

i was perhaps an egotist in youth, but i soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself

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

sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy

Fairies: Nature's attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them.

I was too absorbed to be responsive

People living alone get used to loneliness.

For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!

It was strange to have no self-to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.

I just couldn't make the grade as a hack-that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

So there was not an "I" anymore - not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect - save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more.

I don't much care where I am anymore, nor expect very much from places.

Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.

To most women art is a form of scandal.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering