Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Failure, Defeat, Failures, Mistakes
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.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Idleness
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Ability, Genius, One liners, Action
Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Thoughts, Thought, Thinking
Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Party, Twentieth Century
Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Endurance, Perseverance, Resolve, Health
I know myself, but that is all.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Identity, Self-Knowledge
I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Cities, City Life
Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Boredom, Bores
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Heroes/Heroism, Heroes
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Speech, Conversation
Her voice is full of money.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Wealth, Riches
There are no second acts in American lives.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: America
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Past, Memory, The Past, Time
The reason one writes isn’t the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Writing
There was another silence, while Marjorie considered whether or not convincing her mother was worth the trouble. People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Age, Beliefs
Learn young about hard work and manners – and you’ll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Manners
Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Life
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Libraries
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work – the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside – the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within – that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick – the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the 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.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Attitude, Wisdom, Hope, Ideas, Mindsets, Positive Attitudes, Ability, Intelligence, Optimism
I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Virtues, Virtue
No such thing as a man willing to be honest—that would be like a blind man willing to see.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Honesty
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Personality
When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Authors & Writing
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.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Suffering
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
It’s not a slam at you when people are rude – it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Manners
I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last; a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Romance
The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Leisure, Rest
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
- John Steinbeck American Novelist
- William S. Burroughs American Novelist
- Stephen King American Novelist
- Ken Kesey American Novelist
- James Lane Allen American Novelist
- Philip K. Dick American Novelist
- Ray Bradbury American Science-Fiction Writer
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Nathaniel Hawthorne American Novelist
Leave a Reply