Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

405. “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

406. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

411. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

423. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

427. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

429. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

436. “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

437. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

443. “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

444. “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

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

446. “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

447. “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

448. “Is your generation so soft that they talk of going to pieces if life doesn’t always present itself in terms of beautiful, easy decisions?”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

449. “Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small gray clouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald