Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

360. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

362. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

370. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

373. “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

374. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

385. “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

386. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

388. “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

389. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

391. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

393. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

395. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

399. “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

400. “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