F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that — and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.

There were girls who would tear you apart with their lips.

in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

I’m not sure what I’ll do, but — well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.

That was always my experience—a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich booy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton. So I guess she [his daughter Scottie] can stand it. However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.

a great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain

You've got an awfully kissable mouth.

All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don't come back.

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. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment o the 'Beale Street Blues' while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shiny dust. At the grey 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.

A rigour passed over him,
blood rose into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a steady thumping in his ears. It was first love.

Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief—that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another:

Character is plot, plot is character.

She was incurably dishonest.

All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.