Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

254. “I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

255. “Everywhere we go and move on and change, something’s lost – something’s left behind. You can’t ever quite repeat anything, and I’ve been so yours, here –.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

256. “It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

257. “Begin with an individual, and before you know it you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find you have created – nothing.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

258. “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

259. “If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

260. “It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

261. “A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

262. “How I feel is that if I wanted anything I’d take it. That’s what I’ve always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven’t room for any other desires.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

263. “The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

264. “Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

265. “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

266. “I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

267. “Ours was a generation grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” –.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

268. “So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

269. “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

270. “From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

271. “It isn’t given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

272. “Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

273. “For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

274. “New friends,” he said, as if it were an important point, “can often have a better time together than old friends.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

275. “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

276. “It’s all life is. Just going ’round kissing people.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

277. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

278. “He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

279. “She was beautiful – but especially she was without mercy.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

280. “The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes-but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

281. “The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

282. “Human sympathy has its limits.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

283. “The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the unclear voices of children, already gathered like crikets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

284. “And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

285. “She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

288. “The present was the thing – work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

290. “Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

291. “You’ve got an awfully kissable mouth.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

292. “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

293. “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

294. “I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

295. “He dispensed starlight to casual moths.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

296. “The men – the undergraduates of Yale and Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better-looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

299. “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

300. “I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald