F. Scott Fitzgerald
113 quotes
Biography
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known as F. Scott Fitzgerald or simply Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.
"A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain."
"The victor belongs to the spoils."
"I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."
"The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly."
"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."
"The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young."
"I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."
"Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away."
"I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything."
"And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy."
"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."
"Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy."
"I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity."
"I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won't."
"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead."
"I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."
"You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me."
"There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired."
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
"It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living."
"They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered."
"It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being."
"Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are."
"Every one 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."
"Ah,"she cried, "you look so cool."Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.You always look so cool,"she repeated.She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw."