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, The Past, Memory, Time
Being in love is great – you get a lot of compliments
and begin to think you are a great guy.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
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: Hope, Mindsets, Wisdom, Ability, Intelligence, Attitude, Positive Attitudes, Ideas, Optimism
Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Art
Her voice is full of money.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Riches, Wealth
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Advertising
Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Resolve, Endurance, Health, Perseverance
For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Discovery
Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement—discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
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: Beliefs, Age
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go by any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Family
There are no second acts in American lives.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: America
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
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Socialism, Girls, Communism
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
The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Men
Never confuse activity with action.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Action
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Adversity
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
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Drinking, Alcohol
Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Age
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
No decent career was ever founded on a public.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Career, Public
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
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.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Poetry, Art
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
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Faces, Face, Women
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Hope, Time, Past, The Past
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 Writer
- Ray Bradbury American Science-Fiction Writer
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Nathaniel Hawthorne American Novelist
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