Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes-there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

302. “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

303. “New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

304. “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

305. “I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it – overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

306. “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

307. “They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale – and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

308. “A stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

309. “I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream, He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is...”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

310. “She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

311. “I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

312. “Kiss me a paragraph and I’ll reply with a novel.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

313. “She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one- the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

314. “You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.” “I am careful.” “No, you’re not.” “Well, other people are,” she said lightly. “What’s that got to do with it?” “They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

315. “Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It has seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

316. “The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish ideas in her head and doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

317. “I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

318. “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

319. “You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow. Everybody thinks so – the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. Sophisticated – God, I’m sophisticated!”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

320. “There is a moment – Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word – something that makes it worth while.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

322. “The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaiety, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

323. “Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

324. “At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

326. “By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

327. “When I’m with you, I don’t breathe quite right.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

328. “The bottle of whiskey – the second one – was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who ’felt just as good on nothing at all.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

329. “We’ll meet you on some corner. I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

330. “The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

331. “She wouldn’t let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up in a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

332. “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

333. “They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

334. “Human sympathy has its limits.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

335. “When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

336. “This isn’t just an epigram – life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

337. “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

338. “We haven’t met for many years, said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be. “Five years next November.” The automatic quality set us all back at least another minute.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

339. “She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

341. “The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

342. “She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

343. “I want to be a society vampire, you see.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

344. “For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

345. “The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

346. “Life was a damned muddle – a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of – everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

347. “I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

348. “The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

349. “Never walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is your most vulnerable part-once in bed, you’re safe; he may lie around under the bed all night, but you’re safe as daylight. If you still have doubts pull the blanket over your head.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

350. “You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald