Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

352. “The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

353. “Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

354. “Beware the artist who’s an intellectual also. The artist who doesn’t fit.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

355. “There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

356. “Once a change of direction has begun, even though it’s the wrong one, it still tends to clothe itself as thoroughly in the appurtenances of rightness as if it had been a natural all along.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

357. “There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people if he’s any good.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

358. “Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power-at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

359. “To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

360. “So there was not an “I” anymore-not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect-save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

361. “He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

362. “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

363. “To most women art is a form of scandal.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

364. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

366. “The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

368. “Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

369. “Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge, anything at all...”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

370. “Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

371. “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

372. “But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love lingered – by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life, by way of deep and intimate kindnesses they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

373. “A bad driver is only safe until she met another bad driver.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

374. “But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over, and around a dike.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

375. “As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

376. “There was only one fly in the delicious ointment.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

378. “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

379. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald