Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

207. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

216. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

219. “Her voice sounded like money.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

220. “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

221. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

224. “Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

228. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

230. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

232. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

234. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

241. “A writer wastes nothing.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

245. “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

246. “Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

247. “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

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. “He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

250. “Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn... No – Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald