Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

453. “He used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “I wish I had done everything on earth with you.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

458. “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

459. “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

460. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

462. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

464. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

466. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

469. “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

470. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

473. “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

474. “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

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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

480. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

487. “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

488. “This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and riding smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

489. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

491. “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

492. “I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

493. “Amory: I love you. Rosalind: I love you- now.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

494. “To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

496. “I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

497. “Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

498. “His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

499. “I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

500. “He’s sensitive and I don’t want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn’t care about him.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald