Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

52. “Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

53. “Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

54. “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

55. “It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

56. “They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

57. “Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

58. “Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

60. “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

61. “They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

62. “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.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

63. “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

64. “I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

65. “So we’ll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

66. “Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

68. “Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

69. “The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

70. “So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight – watching over nothing.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

71. “When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It’s better to be cold and young than to love. It’s happened to me before but never like this – so accidental – just when everything was going well.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

72. “Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

73. “She was beautiful, but not like those girls in magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn’t beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

74. “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

75. “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

76. “She was dazzling – alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

77. “Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

78. “You know I’m old in some ways-in others-well, I’m just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

79. “Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin – but they don’t, even you and I...”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

80. “People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

81. “Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

82. “Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

83. “I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

84. “Love is fragile – she was thinking – but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love-words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

85. “People living alone get used to loneliness.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

86. “He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

88. “It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

89. “I can’t exactly describe how I feel but it’s not quite right. And it leaves me cold.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

90. “She wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe forever.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

91. “You remind me of a smoked cigarette.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

92. “Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

93. “Nothing any good isn’t hard.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

94. “I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

95. “It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

96. “What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

97. “The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

98. “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

99. “The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

100. “Once we were one person, and always it will be a little that way.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald