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Home / Books / 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

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

Book by F. Scott Fitzgerald · 50 quotes · People, Ifs, Men

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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 Quotes

“Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost uncanny pull at each others hearts.”

“I can’t exactly describe how I feel but it’s not quite right. And it leaves me cold.”

“I'm merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence.”

“You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.”

“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. When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.”

“...their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.”

“I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.”

“People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.”

“The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.”

“When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her.”

“Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?”

“She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.”

“Kiss me now, love me now.”

“Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.”

“Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.”

“He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.”

“They were still in the happier stages of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered.”

“There's no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it at all.”

“I don't like girls in the daytime,' he said shortly, and then thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: 'But I like you.' He cleared his throat. 'I like you first and second and third.”

“She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game”

“There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.”

“Beauty and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-”

“They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.”

“Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.”

“I found something! Courage--just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always.”

“She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.”

“Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.”

“Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.”

“Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.”

“When I'm with you, I don't breathe quite right.”

“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.”

“One hurries through, even though there's time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.”

“Take off that darn fur coat!...Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows.”

“That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.”

“Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.”

“My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.”

“I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.”

“The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.”

“Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.”

“It was strange to have no self-to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.”

“The world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility”

“Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering”

“I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.”

“It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.”

“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.”

“After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.”

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

“The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.”

“Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.”