“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
― Fitzgerald F. Scott
“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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I’m not sentimental–I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last–the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“You’ll find another.’
God! Banish the thought. Why don’t you tell me that ‘if the girl had been worth having she’d have waited for you’? No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know–because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside. ”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Think how you love me,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.’
You’ll always be like this to me.’
Oh no; but promise me you’ll remember.’ Her tears were falling. ‘I’ll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. 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. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. 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. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“It takes two to make an accident.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald