Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “I spent my Saturday nights in New York, because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

408. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

410. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

414. “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

415. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

426. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

429. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

433. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

437. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

438. “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

439. “His dark eyes took me in, and I wondered what they would look like if he fell in love.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

441. “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

442. “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

443. “A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

444. “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

445. “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

446. “One thin’s sure and nothing’s surer The rich get richer and the poor get – children. In the meantime, In between time...”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

447. “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

448. “Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

449. “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

450. “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