Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

Optimism is the content of small men in high places.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

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. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

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.

Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

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.

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 romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

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.

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

Can't repeat the past?…Why of course you can!

I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.

Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.