Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

About Ernest Hemingway] He's a peach of a fellow and absolutely first-rate.

And you say you're a weak character, that you've no will. Not a bit of will—I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires— You are not! She brought one little fist down onto the other. You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.

I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often 'husbands' and I must marry a lover.

It seems he had some naïve conception of a woman 'fit to be his wife,' a particular conception that I used to run into a lot and that always drove me wild. He demanded a girl who'd never been kissed and who liked to sew and sit home and pay tribute to his selfesteem. And I'll bet a hat if he's gotten an idiot to sit and be stupid with him he's tearing out on the side with some much speedier lady.

He was enough older than Nicole to take pleasure in her youthful vanities and delights, the way she paused fractionally in front of the hall mirror on leaving the restaurant, so that the incorruptible quicksilver could give her back to herself.

extraordinary gift for 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.

She had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening.

Age will go     Back to the old—       For all our tears         We shall not know.

There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe--why, intelligence never built a steam engine! Circumstances built a steam engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness – and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.

Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again.

But for a girl I think she ought to have lots of minor accomplishments and pass them on to her children.

No, I'm thinking about myself - my black old inside self, the real one, with the fundamental honesty that keeps me from being absolutely wicked by making me realize my own sins.

She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.

Una cosa es segura, y nada lo es más: los ricos crían riqueza, y los pobres crían... hijos.

and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes.

As the new alcohol tumbled into his stomach and warmed him, the isolated pictures began slowly to form a cinema reel of the day before.

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.

Is your generation so soft that they talk of going to pieces if life doesn't always present itself in terms of beautiful, easy decisions?

You used to say a man knows things and when he stops knwing things he's like anybody else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things.

Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.

I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.