Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

no girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day its every girl for herself.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

She didnt like it, he said immediately.Of course she did.She didnt like it, he insisted. She didnt have a good time.He was silent and I guessed at his unutterable depression.I feel far away from her, he said. Its hard to make her understand.You mean about the dance?The dance? He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. Old sport, the dance is unimportant.

Well all be failures?Yes. I dont mean only money failures, but just sort of - of ineffectual and sad, and - oh, how can I tell you?

Things are sweeter when theyre lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated a surrender with equanimity. Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him - like an actor kissed in a picture.

I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

Under the glass porte-cochère of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became grey and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxicabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

Understand now, Im purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether its clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world havent had the advantages that youve had.

I just think of people, she continued, whether they seem right where they are and fit into a picture. I dont mind if they dont do anything. I dont see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when people do anything.

Experience is not worth the getting. Its not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--its a wall that an active you runs up against.

After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad.

The present was the thing--work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men.

That most limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man.