Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

352. “I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.” Monsignor.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

353. “At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

354. “Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

355. “And Yale is November, crisp and energetic.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

356. “He dispensed starlight to casual moths.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

357. “You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

358. “Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

359. “I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

360. “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

361. “Have a drink Tom and then you won’t feel so foolish to yourself.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

362. “Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

364. “She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

365. “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

366. “Shakespeare – whetting, frustrating, surprising and gratifying.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

367. “Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

368. “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

369. “As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

370. “You can stroke people with words.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

371. “Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

373. “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

374. “They were still in the happier stages of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

375. “I am a woman and my business is to hold things together. My business is to tear them apart.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

376. “All the bright precious things fade so fast.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

377. “A man’s social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

378. “The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

379. “Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

380. “One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

381. “The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire’s bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

382. “The hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

385. “Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

386. “He used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

387. “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

388. “She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

389. “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

390. “A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She’s too pretty.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

392. “Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you – like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist – or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

393. “As the still ocean paths before the shark in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the moon-swathed trees divided, pair on pair, while flapping nightbirds cried across the air.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

394. “He felt married to her, that was all.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

395. “A squalid phantasmagoria of breath.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

396. “When he buys his ties he has to ask if gin will make them run.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

398. “He says unloved women have no biographies – they have histories.” Anthony laughed again. “Surely.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

400. “Someday I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald