Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

102. “It appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbours as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

103. “I hope something happens. I’m restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

104. “For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

105. “Well, I can’t describe her exactly-except to say that she was beautiful. She was-tremendously alive.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

106. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

107. “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

108. “The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

109. “January, the Monday of months...”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

110. “No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

111. “There was a kindliness about intoxication – there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

112. “You really ought to read more books – you know, those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

113. “The rich get richer and the poor get – children.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

114. “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

115. “Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

116. “The ability to hold two competing thoughts in one’s mind and still be able to function is the mark of a superior mind.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

117. “It takes a genius to whine appealingly.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

118. “Character is plot, plot is character.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

119. “It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

120. “Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

121. “Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

122. “Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush-these alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth-bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love’s exaltation.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

123. “I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

124. “Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

125. “And then, one fairy night, May became June.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

126. “Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

127. “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

128. “Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

129. “Egyptian Proverb: The worst things: To be in bed and sleep not, To want for one who comes not, To try to please and please not.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

130. “We all have souls of different ages.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

131. “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.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

132. “I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

133. “Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

134. “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

135. “The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

137. “There are no second acts in American lives.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

138. “Happiness is the relief after extreme tension.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

139. “I used to build dreams about you.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

140. “Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

141. “Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

142. “This is all. It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn’t do – and wouldn’t last.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

143. “Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

144. “A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

145. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

146. “It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

147. “If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

149. “If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

150. “It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald