Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

there seemed some necessity of taking all or nothing; it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved--so easy to be loved--so hard to love.

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.

Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

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.

Her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.

I love her and that's the beginning of everything...

She knew few words and believed in none.

How strange to have failed as a social creature—even criminals do not fail that way—they are the law's Loyal Opposition, so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.

But you can love more than just one person, can't you?

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.

that voice was a deathless song.

Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.

Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.

I used to build dreams about you.

I might have enjoyed the company of a woman or two... Or three but that had never stopped me from loving you.

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter - like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination, Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it, and everything all at once seemed gorgeous.

I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.

Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.

What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?

He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want -- not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable...'very few things matter and nothing matters very much

Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning.