Top 500 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (2023 Update)
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401. “A squalid phantasmagoria of breath.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

403. “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

404. “This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

405. “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

406. “Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

407. “It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

408. “People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man’s duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

409. “He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

410. “But the rest offended her – and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

411. “But you can love more than just one person, can’t you?”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

412. “Back out,’ he suggested after a moment. ‘Put her in reverse.’ ‘But the WHEEL’S off!’ He hesitated. ‘No harm in trying,’ he said.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

413. “When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

414. “Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

415. “That’s the whole burden of this novel – the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

416. “I was too absorbed to be responsive.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

417. “No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

418. “Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you – it’s a wall that an active you runs up against.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

419. “Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

420. “Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

422. “The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

423. “I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

424. “She was a dark, unenduring little flower – yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

425. “That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

426. “Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

428. “The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

429. “I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

430. “Better let it all alone in the depths of her heart and the depths of the sea.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

431. “I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

432. “At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

433. “Cut out all these exclamation jokes. An explanation point is like laughing at your own joke. I’m going to delete you from my contacts if you keep sending solely emoji texts. You’re a grown-ass man.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

434. “Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

435. “She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

436. “Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

437. “If all your clothes are worn to the same state, it means you go out too much.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

439. “Amory: I love you. Rosalind: I love you- now.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

440. “I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

441. “Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

442. “I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe – and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

443. “Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

444. “He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

445. “Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

446. “Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

447. “It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

448. “How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

449. “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

450. “Every act of life, from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner, became an effort. I hated the night when I couldn’t sleep and I hated the day because it went toward night.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald