Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

202. “I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

203. “There’s so much spring in the air- there’s so much lazy sweetness in your heart.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

204. “America is a willingness of the heart.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

205. “It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

206. “Optimism is the content of small men in high places.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

207. “Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

208. “It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

209. “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

210. “You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

211. “A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

212. “He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths – so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

213. “The greatest profound pain is cased by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

214. “She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

215. “These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire – I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

216. “But I always felt that I’d rather be provincial hot-tamale than soup without seasoning.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

217. “So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

218. “There’s no beauty without poignancy and there’s no poignancy without the feeling that it’s going, men, names, books, houses – bound for dust – mortal –.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

219. “But I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

220. “I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

221. “For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

222. “Her voice sounded like money.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

223. “The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

224. “Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

225. “Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

226. “The reason one writes isn’t the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

227. “This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

228. “The sign of intelligence is the ability to carry opposed thoughts at the same time.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

229. “It was Sunday – not a day, but rather a gap between two other days.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

230. “One hurries through, even though there’s time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

231. “Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them – their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

232. “I have never wished there was a God to call on- I have often wished there was a God to thank.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

233. “I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

234. “Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

235. “People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

236. “How strange to have failed as a social creature – even criminals do not fail that way – they are the law’s “Loyal Opposition,” so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

237. “After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

238. “It was strange to have no self-to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

239. “But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

240. “All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness – and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

241. “Nicole’s world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

242. “Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

243. “A writer wastes nothing.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

244. “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 – tomorrow 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

245. “And so we beat on, books against the critics, borne back ceaslessly into rewrites.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

246. “If you are strong enough, there are no precedents.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

247. “Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

248. “I talk with the authority of failure – Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

249. “I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

250. “Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can’t, shan’t be the setting – it’s going to be the performance, the lively, lovely, glamorous performance, and the world shall be the scenery.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald