Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “Long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

252. “When a man is tired of life on his 21st birthday it indicates that he is rather tired of something in himself.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

253. “What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

254. “No matter how low you go, there’s always an unexplored basement.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

255. “I like France, where everybody thinks he’s Napoleon – down here everybody thinks he’s Christ.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

256. “But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone – he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

257. “The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption – and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

258. “Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

259. “I’m not used to being loved. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

260. “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

261. “He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

263. “Almost everybody can be imagined as either a cat or a dog.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

264. “She wanted what most women want, but she wanted it much more fiercely and passionately.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

265. “Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

266. “I was in love with a whirlwind, so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

267. “At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

268. “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

269. “All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

271. “They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

273. “But his eyes, dimmed by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

274. “Murder your darlings.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

275. “Kiss me now, love me now.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

276. “The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

278. “I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

279. “Let’s borrow life preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

280. “This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding – it’s got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

281. “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

282. “Dear, don’t think of getting out of bed yet. I’ve always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

283. “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

284. “I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

285. “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

286. “Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

287. “I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

288. “A writer wastes nothing.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

289. “You can’t repeat the past.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

291. “What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

292. “And in the end, we were all just humans... drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

293. “New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn East and North toward them – this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

294. “Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

295. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

297. “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

298. “Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

299. “Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

300. “He knew women early and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald