Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

How I feel is that if I wanted anything I'd take it. That's what I've always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven't room for any other desires.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this - so accidental - just when everything was going well.

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

I know myself, he cried, but that is all.

We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical ill-considered criticism.

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

She was beautiful - but especially she was without mercy.

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

A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty.

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.

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

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

Can't repeat the past? he cried incredulously. Why of course you can! He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

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

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.

It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.

If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter--as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

I want leisure to read—an immense amount.

He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden.

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.

All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream