F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

"Want any of this stuff? Jordan?... Nick?"
I didn't answer.
Nick?" he asked again.
What?"
Want any?"
No... I just remembered that today's my birthday."
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.

The price for his intactness was incompleteness.

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed — the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

I wish I had done everything on earth with you

People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.

Only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, towards that lost voice across the room.

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.

I hate dainty minds,' answered Marjorie. 'But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it.

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.

I can’t exactly describe how I feel but it’s not quite right. And it leaves me cold.

Of this story I can say that it came to me in an irresistible form, crying to be written. It will be accused perhaps of being a mere piece of sentimentality, but, as I saw it, it was a great deal more. If, therefore, it lacks the ring of sincerity, or even, of tragedy, the fault rests not with the theme but with my handling of it.

Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen...

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.