Fitzgerald Quotes

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“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

“There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“You've got an awfully kissable mouth.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls

“He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want -- not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable...'very few things matter and nothing matters very much”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls

“I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls

“Then she added in a sort of childish delight: 'We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!' She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss.

'It's impossible to be both together,' said John grimly. 'People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two...”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Other Stories

“A squalid phantasmagoria of breath”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams

“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story”
― Robert Fitzgerald

“I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe?”
― Bridie Clark, Because She Can

“There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.”
― F.Scott Fitzgerald

“I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Won’t we be quite the pair? You with your bad heart, me with my bad head. Together, though, we might have something worthwhile.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“Do you read them? Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald?"
"Only if I have to. I try to avoid old dead white men.”
― John Grisham, Camino Island

“I'm romantic - a sentimental person thinks things will last - a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified - their senses of humour crawled into corners to sleep;”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I've found that I can always do the things that people do in books. Really they are the only things I can do.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Nobody seems to bore you," he objected
"About half the world do," she admitted, "but I think that’s a pretty good average, don’t you?" and she turned to find something in Browning that bore on the subject. She was the only person he ever met who could look up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of conversation, and yet not be irritating to distraction. She did it constantly, with such serious enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching her golden hair bent over a book, brow wrinkled so little at hunting her sentence.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Aren't you interested in anything except yourself?"

"Not much.”
― F Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Sembra che per sfuggire al dolore dobbiamo ripercorrere gli stessi passi che ci hanno portati lì.”
― Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“As Henry Dan Piper, one of Fitzgerald's most perceptive critics, has commented, his fiction heroes "are destroyed because they attempt to fulfill themselves through their social relationships. They cannot distinguish between social values like popularity, charm, and success, and the more lasting moral values." Their creator did make that distinction, however, and so was constantly surrounding his characters with a mist of admiration and then blowing it away.”
― Scott Donaldson, Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as is he were related to one thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament" - it was an extraordinary gift of hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”
― Fitzgerald Scott

“Sometimes, when he was particularly loquacious, she went to sleep in his arms, but he loved that Rosalind—all Rosalinds—as he had never in the world loved any one else. Intangibly fleeting, unrememberable hours.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Nicole Diver, la schiena bruna ornata di perle, sfogliava un libro di ricette in cerca del pollo alla Maryland. Poteva avere ventiquattro anni, ipotizzò Rosemary – il viso era di una bellezza convenzionale, ma dava l'impressione di essere stato inizialmente concepito su scala eroica, con una struttura e i lineamenti marcati, come se i tratti e la vivacità della fronte e dell'incarnato, che associamo al temperamento e al carattere, fossero stati scolpiti con un'intenzione rodinesca e in un secondo momento fossero stati cesellati in direzione della bellezza, con il rischio che la benché minima imprecisione ne compromettesse in modo irreparabile la forza e la qualità.”
― Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“As Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald, describing the act of letter-writing: “Such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something”
― Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

“Once the sounds of birds were reassuring. Once, it was a sign of danger if the birds had gone quiet. Now, the sounds of birds would be foreign, even wrong. Now, it was always quiet because there was always danger.”
― M.P. Fitzgerald, A Happy Bureaucracy

“She regarded Arthur with the corners of her eyes as she drove, noting that he was wearing a seatbelt, even though there was no more law requiring him to do so. There was no seatbelt around her, and in truth if she was the van's only occupant there wouldn't be any pants either.”
― M.P. Fitzgerald, A Happy Bureaucracy

“For [Beth] Davis, Fitzgerald's [Louisiana] story carried another, broader message for Americans. 'If veterans could come together so soon after the War and forgive and forget, then surely we can overcome our differences,' she said. 'Old wounds were healed here, old barriers overcome. Seems like we should be able to do the same.”
― Tony Horwitz