Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

453. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

454. “Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

456. “Is your generation so soft that they talk of going to pieces if life doesn’t always present itself in terms of beautiful, easy decisions?”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

457. “The hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

458. “They were still in the happier stages of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

459. “As the still ocean paths before the shark in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the moon-swathed trees divided, pair on pair, while flapping nightbirds cried across the air.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

460. “Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

461. “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.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

462. “A man’s social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

463. “Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you – like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist – or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

464. “Gatsby looked at Daisy in a way that every young girl wanted to be looked at.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

465. “But the rest offended her – and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

466. “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.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

467. “Someday I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

468. “One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

469. “The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire’s bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

470. “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.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

471. “He felt married to her, that was all.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

472. “The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

473. “She was a dark, unenduring little flower – yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

474. “When he buys his ties he has to ask if gin will make them run.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

475. “He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

476. “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something- most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

477. “A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She’s too pretty.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

479. “Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you – it’s a wall that an active you runs up against.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

480. “Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

481. “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.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

482. “Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

483. “It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

484. “Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

485. “Listen! The world only exists in your eyes – your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you’re trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked – it’s the Grand Canyon.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

486. “Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

488. “I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

489. “I glanced back once. A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby’s house, making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

490. “Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

491. “I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

493. “How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

494. “She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

495. “The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

496. “I’m more beautiful than anybody else,” she said brokenly, “why can’t I be happy?”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

497. “He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

498. “Cut out all these exclamation jokes. An explanation point is like laughing at your own joke. I’m going to delete you from my contacts if you keep sending solely emoji texts. You’re a grown-ass man.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

499. “When I see a beautiful shell like that I can’t help feeling a regret about what’s inside it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

500. “Every act of life, from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner, became an effort. I hated the night when I couldn’t sleep and I hated the day because it went toward night.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald