Best 882 quotes of F. Scott Fitzgerald on MyQuotes

A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.

Action is character.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

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

Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. You always look so cool," she repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.

All I think of ever is that I love you.

All things come to him who mates.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

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

all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand

Almost everybody can be imagined as either a cat or a dog.

A lot of young girls together is a romantic secret thing like the first sight of wild ducks at dawn.

A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.

A man's social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich.

America is a willingness of the heart.

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

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain.

Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen.

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.

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

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.

And he could not tell why the struggle was worthwhile, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed... He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. I know myself," he cried, "But that is all.

And in the end, we were all just humans...Drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.

And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.

And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

And will I like being called a jazz-baby? You will love it.

And Yale is November, crisp and energetic.

An unread book is just a block of paper.

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.

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty.

A sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.

A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths.

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.

At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon.

A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.

A writer like me must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothing-can-happen-to me, nothing-can-touch-me.... I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip.

Baseball is a game played by idiots for morons.

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.

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. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that.

Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses

Before you criticize others, remember, they may not have had the same opportunities in life as you have had