F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

Just as he still cared more for her than for any other creature, so did he more intensely and frequently hate her.

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and third — -before long the best lines cancel out — -and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the picture have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true.

Never miss a party...good for the nerves — like celery.

You're a historian. Tell me if there are any bath-tubs in history. I think they've been frightfully neglected.

"After the sureties of youth there sets in a period of intense and intolerable complexity. With the soda-jerker this period is so short as to be almost negligible. Men higher in the scale hold out longer in the attempt to preserve the ultimate niceties of relationship, to retain "impractical" ideas of integrity. But by the late twenties the business has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto been imminent and confusing has become gradually remote and dim. Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future - so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for rules of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic. It is left to the few to be persistently concerned with the nuances of relationships - and even this few only in certain hours especially set aside for the task."

And Yale is November, crisp and energetic.

There is a moment — Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word — something that makes it worth while.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher — a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.

He had no plans, no definite intentions, except to kiss her lips again, to hold her in his arms.

Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions.

I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.

I knew that what was left of me would always love you, but never in quite the same way.