The Beautiful and Damned Quotes

“Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“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

“She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful And Damned

“A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Everywhere we go and
move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't
ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I don't care about truth. I want some happiness.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“We all have souls of different ages”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth...”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“How I feel is that if I wanted anything I'd take it. That's what I've always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven't room for any other desires.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“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, The Beautiful and Damned

“It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I...”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“All I think of ever is that I love you.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned