F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.

She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.

We all have souls of different ages

Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.

For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you find you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.

The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

I'm not sure what I'll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

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.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

It isn't given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.

The rich get richer and the poor get - children.

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

One should . . . be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

I know myself," he cried, "but that is all-

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

He snatched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his burred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

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

Her voice is full of money.

The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaiety, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

Optimism is the content of small men in high places.