Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

303. “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

304. “People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man’s duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

305. “The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

306. “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

307. “There has never been an American tragedy. There have only been great failures.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

308. “You can stroke people with words.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

309. “Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

312. “Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

313. “Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

314. “Fairies: Nature’s attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

315. “A squalid phantasmagoria of breath.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

316. “But you can love more than just one person, can’t you?”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

317. “The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

319. “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

320. “Learn young about hard work and manners – and you’ll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

321. “When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

322. “As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. 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

323. “Back out,’ he suggested after a moment. ‘Put her in reverse.’ ‘But the WHEEL’S off!’ He hesitated. ‘No harm in trying,’ he said.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

324. “That’s the whole burden of this novel – the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

325. “Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

326. “I was too absorbed to be responsive.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

327. “At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

329. “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

330. “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

331. “So they were desperately in love and being desperately in love involves a desperate existence.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

332. “Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

333. “No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

334. “I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe – and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

335. “Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

336. “That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

337. “There’s no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don’t feel it at all.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

338. “The sea, he thought, had treasured its memories deeper than the faithless land.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

339. “Murder your darlings.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

341. “The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

342. “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

343. “I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

344. “I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

345. “Receding from grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

346. “He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

347. “She knew few words and believed in none.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

348. “Kiss me now, love me now.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

349. “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

350. “It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald