"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselssly into the past."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"There must have been moments even that afternoon whe 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. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won't."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)

"And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside. "
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)

"His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.""
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

""Ah," she cried, "you look so cool."

Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.

"You always look so cool," she repeated.

She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)

"I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken..."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.

- Nick Carroway"
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"'Think how you love me,' she whispered. 'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.'

'You'll always be like this to me.'

'Oh no; but promise me you'll remember.' Her tears were falling. 'I'll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight.'"
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Magnetism)

"Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

"I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection)

"It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"And he could not tell why the struggle was worthwhile, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed...

He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.

"I know myself," he cried, "But that is all.""
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)

"Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!"
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"why shouldn't he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase-- 'I love you'"
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Offshore Pirate)

"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 and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"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 (Tender Is the Night)

"They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby & The Diamond as Big as the Ritz)

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)