Authors:

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes - Page 19

All Quotes Accidents Affection Age Art Birth Blame Boredom Character Childhood Children College Confusion Country Criticism Desire Destiny Drinking Earth Education Effort Excellence Failing Falling In Love Fashion Feelings Fun Genius Giving Gold Grief Growth Happiness Hate Heart History Home Honor House Hurt Imagination Inspiration Inspirational Judgement Kindness Kissing Laughter Leaving Life Listening Literature Loneliness Love Lying Manners Memories Moon Morning Motivational Pain Passion Past Personality Philosophy Positive Thinking Poverty Quality Rain Reading Reality Regret Responsibility Romantic Love Running Sadness School Sleep Son Soul Spring Struggle Style Success Suffering Summer Sunshine Talent Time Tradition Tragedy Twilight Virtue Waiting War Water Wife Wine Writing Youth
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Success, Jealousy, Good Luck
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “Collected Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.102, e-artnow

I am a woman and my business is to hold things together. My business is to tear them apart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tears, Together
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.371, e-artnow

Understand now, I'm 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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Believe, Law, Laughing

The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Clever, Garden, Tea
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “Collected Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.157, e-artnow

The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes-but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Children, Eye, Old Things
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “Collected Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.98, e-artnow

So they were desperately in love and being desperately in love involves a desperate existence.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Desperate, Existence

Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can't, shan't be the setting - it's going to be the performance, the lively, lovely, glamorous performance, and the world shall be the scenery.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Love, Romantic, Needs

If all your clothes are worn to the same state, it means you go out too much.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mean, Clothes, Too Much
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2009). “The Crack-Up”, p.125, New Directions Publishing

Fairies: Nature's attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Boys, Fairy, Homosexuality
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2009). “The Crack-Up”, p.205, New Directions Publishing

I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sacrifice, Epic, Men
Letter to Frances Scott Fitzgerald, Spring 1940

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ideas, Foolish, Born
The Crack-Up "Note-Books" (1945)

But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dream, Struggle, Voice
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more”, p.555, e-artnow

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Apology, Later In Life, Feet
"The Crack-Up". Book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1936.

Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Children, Ohio, Quality

But I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Spring, Order, Dripping
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.434, e-artnow

Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mad, Crooks, Puritan
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2013). “Three Novels: Tender is the Night; The Beautiful and Damned; Thi”, p.286, Simon and Schuster

It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life - it can be a superabundance of interest.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Poverty, Spirit, Tender Is The Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Book House (2016). “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Complete Novels (Book House)”, p.649, Book House

Have a drink Tom and then you won't feel so foolish to yourself.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Drink, Foolish, Feels

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Taken, People, Confusion
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.553, e-artnow

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Stories, Jordan, West
The Great Gatsby ch. 9 (1925)

Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Thinking, Futility Of Life, Evil
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2016). “The Beautiful and Damned: American Literature”, p.287, VM eBooks

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Transition, Libertine
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.82, e-artnow

I'm one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into men on such nights as these. I have the social courage to go on the stage, but not the energy; I haven't the patience to write books; and I never met a man I'd marry. However, I'm only eighteen.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Book, Writing, Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.267, e-artnow

His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dream, Green Lights, Docks
The Great Gatsby ch. 9 (1925)

Then there came a faraway, booming voice like a low, clear bell. It came from the center of the bowl and down the great sides to the ground and then bounced toward her eagerly. 'You see I am fate,' it shouted, 'and stronger than your puny plans; and I am how-things-turn-out and I am different from your little dreams, and I am the flight of time and the end of beauty and unfulfilled desire; all the accidents and imperceptions and the little minutes that shape the crucial hours are mine. I am the exception that proves no rules, the limits of your control, the condiment in the dish of life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dream, Fate, Voice

You May Also Like: